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Food web complexity and stability across habitat connectivity gradients

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Abstract

The effects of habitat connectivity on food webs have been studied both empirically and theoretically, yet the question of whether empirical results support theoretical predictions for any food web metric other than species richness has received little attention. Our synthesis brings together theory and empirical evidence for how habitat connectivity affects both food web stability and complexity. Food web stability is often predicted to be greatest at intermediate levels of connectivity, representing a compromise between the stabilizing effects of dispersal via rescue effects and prey switching, and the destabilizing effects of dispersal via regional synchronization of population dynamics. Empirical studies of food web stability generally support both this pattern and underlying mechanisms. Food chain length has been predicted to have both increasing and unimodal relationships with connectivity as a result of predators being constrained by the patch occupancy of their prey. Although both patterns have been documented empirically, the underlying mechanisms may differ from those predicted by models. In terms of other measures of food web complexity, habitat connectivity has been empirically found to generally increase link density but either reduce or have no effect on connectance, whereas a unimodal relationship is expected. In general, there is growing concordance between empirical patterns and theoretical predictions for some effects of habitat connectivity on food webs, but many predictions remain to be tested over a full connectivity gradient, and empirical metrics of complexity are rarely modeled. Closing these gaps will allow a deeper understanding of how natural and anthropogenic changes in connectivity can affect real food webs.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded with the assistance of the Government of Canada/avec l’appui du Gouvernement du Canada, by doctoral, postdoctoral and Discovery grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to RML, PK and DS, respectively. We also thank Jana Petermann, Andrew MacDonald, Nathan Kraft, Hamish Greig, and Ross Thompson for valuable comments that improved this paper.

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  1. Department of Zoology and Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, 6270 University Blvd., Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Robin M. LeCraw, Pavel Kratina & Diane S. Srivastava

  2. School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Pavel Kratina

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  1. Robin M. LeCraw
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  2. Pavel Kratina
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Correspondence to Pavel Kratina.

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LeCraw, R.M., Kratina, P. & Srivastava, D.S. Food web complexity and stability across habitat connectivity gradients. Oecologia 176, 903–915 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3083-7

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