Open AccessFood web rewiring drives long-term compositional differences and late-disturbance interactions at the community level
Author(s) -
Francesco Polazzo,
Tomás I. Marina,
Melina Celeste Crettaz Minaglia,
Andreu Rico
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.011
H-Index - 771
eISSN - 1091-6490
pISSN - 0027-8424
DOI - 10.1073/pnas.2117364119
Subject(s) - disturbance (geology) , food web , mesocosm , ecology , community structure , term (time) , biology , environmental science , ecosystem , physics , quantum mechanics , paleontology
Significance Multiple anthropogenic disturbances affect the structure and functioning of communities. Recent evidence highlighted that, after pulse disturbance, the functioning a community performs may be recovered fast due to functional redundancy, whereas community multivariate composition needs a longer time. Yet, the mechanisms that drive the different community recovery times have not been quantified empirically. We use quantitative food-web analysis to assess the influence of species interactions on community recovery. We found species-interactions strength to be the main mechanism driving differences between structural and functional recovery. Additionally, we show that interactions between multiple disturbances appear in the long term only when both species-interaction strength and food-web architecture change significantly.