Modelling quantitative carbon flows in soil food webs
Final Report Abstract
This project has accomplished several steps towards establishing models predicting the carbon fluxes through complex soil food webs. In the first phase of the research unit, a binary food web of the agricultural soil field site has been assembled describing the populations and their trophic interactions. Additionally, data bases on assimilation and respiration rates have been built. Analyses of these data bases provided generalized scaling models how the rates of assimilation and respiration as well as the feeding fluxes through food-web links depend on the individual body masses of the species and the environmental temperature. The predictions of the model were tested in a laboratory experiment comprising a subset of the Holtensen species community. In the second phase of the research unit, the respiration and assimilation data were used for constructing a quantitative food web model with explicit carbon flows among populations. Moreover, a unified carbon model combined abiotic and biotic carbon flows to predict their interplay depending on driving variables such as warming. Exploration of the model simulations will be continued. This offers the unique opportunity to obtain a comprehensive understanding of carbon flows in highly-resolved food webs.
Publications
- (2011). Phylogenetic grouping, curvature and metabolic scaling in terrestrial invertebrates. Ecology Letters 14, 993 – 1000
Ehnes, R.B., Rall, B.C., Brose, U.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01660.x) - (2012). Warming effects on consumption and intraspecific interference competition depend on predator metabolism. Journal of Animal Ecology 81, 516-523
Lang, B., Rall, B.C., Brose, U.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2656.2011.01931.x) - (2014). Effects of environmental warming and drought on size-structured soil food webs; Oikos 123, 1224-1233
Lang, B., Rall, B.C., Scheu, S., Brose, U.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2013.00894.x)
