Article
Climate change, nutrition, and bottom-up and top-down food web processes
Trends in Ecology & Evolution
(2016)
Abstract
Climate change ecology has focused on climate effects on trophic interactions through the lenses of temperature effects on organismal physiology and phenological asynchronies. Trophic interactions are also affected by the nutrient content of resources, but this topic has received less attention. Using concepts from nutritional ecology, we propose a conceptual framework for understanding how climate affects food webs through top-down and bottom-up processes impacted by co-occurring environmental drivers. The framework integrates climate effects on consumer physiology and feeding behavior with effects on resource nutrient content. It illustrates how studying responses of simplified food webs to simplified climate change might produce erroneous predictions. We encourage greater integrative complexity of climate change research on trophic interactions to resolve patterns and enhance predictive capacities.
Keywords
- carbon dioxide,
- herbivore
Disciplines
Publication Date
December, 2016
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2016.09.009
Citation Information
Adam E. Rosenblatt and Oswald J. Schmitz. "Climate change, nutrition, and bottom-up and top-down food web processes" Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2016) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/adam-rosenblatt/8/