Complex Food Webs Prevent Competitive Exclusion Amongst Producer Species
July 23rd, 2008 | by admin |Competitive exclusion prevents coexistence of producer species, which eventually limits the biodiversity of natural ecosystems.
For the first time, analyses of complex food-web models show that herbivory predominantly reduces the biomass of dominant producers without assuming a trade-off between the producers’ nutrient-intake efficiency and their resistance to herbivory. Instead, a strong negative feedback loop emerges in food webs: factors that increase producer biomasses also increase herbivory, which reduces producer biomasses.
This negative feedback loop regulates the co-existence and biomass patterns of the producers by balancing biomass increases of producers and biomass fluxes to herbivores, which prevents competitive exclusion.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Proceedings B is the Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal, dedicated to the rapid publication and broad dissemination of high-quality research papers, reviews and comment and reply papers. The scope of journal is diverse and is especially strong in organismal biology.
www.publishing.royalsociety.org/proceedingsb
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