Abstract
Meta-foodweb theory is considered a promising approach for explaining species diversity and foodweb complexity. Recently Pillai et al. (2010) proposed a simple modeling framework for the dynamics of food webs at the metacommunity level. Here, we employ this framework to compute general conditions for the persistence of complex meta-foodwebs. The persistence conditions found depend on the connectivity of the resource patches and the structure of the assembled food web, thus linking the underlying spatial patch-network and the species interaction network. We find that the persistence of omnivores is more likely when it is feeding on (a) prey on low trophic levels, and (b) prey on similar trophic levels.
Highlights
A central aim of ecology is to understand the emergence and maintenance of the enormous diversity of ecological species
By persisting in a given system a species can open up a niche for a predator feeding on that species. This mechanism can in principle enable the coexistence of a large numbers of species in complex food webs
The observed food webs may be missing some nodes, if some species go extinct on all patches, or links, if some predator-prey interactions are not realized in any patch
Summary
A central aim of ecology is to understand the emergence and maintenance of the enormous diversity of ecological species. By persisting in a given system a species can open up a niche for a predator feeding on that species This mechanism can in principle enable the coexistence of a large numbers of species in complex food webs. Growing evidence suggests that, at least in some systems, the food web emerges only on a regional scale, whereas simple food chains are observed if specific locations (patches) are considered in isolation (see Fig. 1)(Pillai, Gonzalez & Loreau 2011). This points to a need for a meta-community perspective, in which one explicitly accounts for the dispersal of species across a network of patches.
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