Publications (3)0 Total impact
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Article: Size-based food web characteristics govern the response to species extinctions
Basic and Applied Ecology. 10/2011; 12:1-9. -
Article: Robustness to secondary extinctions : Comparing trait-based sequential deletions in static and dynamic food webs
Basic and Applied Ecology. 01/2011; 12. -
Article: The susceptibility of species to extinctions in model communities
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ABSTRACT: Despite the fact that the loss of a species from a community has the potential to cause a dramatic decline in biodiversity, for example through cascades of secondary extinctions, little is known about the factors contributing to the extinction risk of any particular species. Here we expand earlier modeling approaches using a dynamic food-web model that accounts for bottom-up as well as top-down effects. We investigate what factors influence a species’ extinction risk and time to extinction of the non-persistent species. We identified three basic properties that affect a species’ risk of extinction. The highest extinction risk is born by species with (1) low energy input (e.g. high trophic level), (2) susceptibility to the loss of energy pathways (e.g. specialists with few prey species) and (3) dynamic instability (e.g. low Hill exponent and reliance on homogeneous energy channels when feeding on similarly sized prey). Interestingly, and different from field studies, we found that the trophic levelBasic and Applied Ecology. 01/2011; 12:590-599.
Institutions
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2011
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Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
- Johann-Friedrich-Blumenbach-Institute for Zoology & Anthropology
Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
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