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Miguel B. Araújo Lab

Predicting the effects of environmental change on biodiversity

You are here: Home / Research Highlights / Biogeography of bird and mammal trophic structures

Biogeography of bird and mammal trophic structures

  • Ecography (2022 )
  • Authors: Manuel Mendoza, Miguel B. Araújo
  • Link to article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecog.06289

Does climate determine the trophic organization of communities around the world? A recent study showed that a limited number of community trophic structures emerge when co-occurrence of trophic guilds among large mammals is examined globally. We ask whether the pattern is general across all terrestrial mammals (n = 5272) and birds (n = 9993). We found that the six community-trophic structures previously identified with large mammals are largely maintained when all mammals and birds are examined, both together and separately, and that bioclimatic variables, including net primary productivity (NPP), are strongly related to variation in the geographical boundaries of community trophic structures. We argue that results are consistent with the view that trophic communities are self-organized structures optimizing energy flows, and that climate likely acts as the main control parameter by modulating the amount of solar energy available for conversion by plants and percolated through food webs across trophic communities. Gradual changes in climate parameters would thus be expected to trigger abrupt changes in energy flows resulting from phase transitions (tipping points) between different dynamical stable states. We expect future research to examine if our results are general across organisms, ecosystems, scales and methodologies, and whether inferences rooted in complex systems theory are supported. The emergence of general patterns in the functional properties of animal communities at broad scales supports the emergence of food-web biogeography as a sub-discipline of biogeography focused on the analysis of the geographical distributions of trophic relationships among organisms.

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News

  • Highly cited researcher 2022
  • New project: NaturaConnect
  • Jury of Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity meets in Lisbon
  • Interview in "El Español"
  • Interview in Ambiente Magazine

Outreach

  • 200 anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace
  • Is the planet full? TV programme
  • COP27 - Razones para optimismo?
  • Human disturbances affect the topology of food webs
  • Interview in Ambiente Magazine

Opportunities

  • La Caixa PhD studentship
  • Position available: Technician
  • Call for access to Iberian Pond data (2022)
  • First call AQUACOSM-PLUS
  • La Caixa Foundation PhD studentship on climate change and protected areas

Research Highlights

Human disturbances affect the topology of food webs

Biogeography of bird and mammal trophic structures

Strategy games to improve environmental policymaking

Response of an Afro-Palearctic bird migrant to glaciation cycles

Improvements in reports of species redistribution under climate change are required

Books

Biodiversidade 2030

Biodiversidade 2030

Ecological Niches and Geographic Distributions

Ecological Niches and Geographic Distributions

Spatial Conservation Prioritization

Spatial Conservation Prioritization

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