Detritus and Nutrients in Food Webs

Abstract

A goal of this book is to integrate various approaches to the study of food webs so that a better understanding of the structure and dynamics of food webs can be gained. In this section we see this call for integration emphasized, and in fact extended. All chapters point to the need to integrate two historically separate approaches to ecology—population interactions and ecosystem processes. Specifically, this set of chapters shows—in a diversity of ways—how explicit incorporation of detritus and nutrients as compartments in species-based food webs can improve our understanding of how food webs are regulated. The authors argue that in order to adequately understand species interactions we may need to incorporate ecosystem processes, and vice versa. Such integration can clarify our understanding of several general ecological concepts, including the relative roles of top-down and bottom-up forces; the importance of spatial and temporal scale; the role of individual species in ecosystem processes such as nutrient recycling and nutrient budgets; the relative importance of direct and indirect effects; and the roles of organism size and the microbial food web in the regulation of energy flow. Here we first describe key aspects of each chapter and then conclude with some general emergent concepts.