fluxweb: a R package to easily estimate energy fluxes in food webs

Gauzens, Benoit; Barnes, Andrew; Giling, Darren; Hines, Jes; Jochum, Malte; Lefcheck, Jonathan S.; Rosenbaum, Benjamin; Wang, Shaopeng; Brose, Ulrich (2019). fluxweb: a R package to easily estimate energy fluxes in food webs. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 10(2), pp. 270-279. Wiley-Blackwell 10.1111/2041-210x.13109

[img]
Preview
Text
2018_MethEcolEvol_accepted.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Publisher holds Copyright.

Download (471kB) | Preview
[img] Text
2019_MethodsEcolEvol_10_270.pdf - Published Version
Restricted to registered users only
Available under License Publisher holds Copyright.

Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Understanding how changes in biodiversity will impact the stability and functioning of ecosystems is a central challenge in ecology. Food‐web approaches have been advocated to link community composition with ecosystem functioning by describing the fluxes of energy among species or trophic groups. However, estimating such fluxes remains problematic because current methods become unmanageable as network complexity increases.

We developed a generalisation of previous indirect estimation methods assuming a steady state system [1, 2, 3]: the model estimates energy fluxes in a top‐down manner assuming system equilibrium; each node's losses (consumption and physiological) balances its consumptive gains. Jointly, we provide theoretical and practical guidelines to use the fluxweb R package (available on CRAN at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/fluxweb/index.html

We also present how the framework can merge with the allometric theory of ecology [4] to calculate fluxes based on easily obtainable organism‐level data (i.e. body masses and species groups ‐eg, plants animals), opening its use to food webs of all complexities. Physiological losses (metabolic losses or losses due to death other than from predation within the food web) may be directly measured or estimated using allometric relationships based on the metabolic theory of ecology, and losses and gains due to predation are a function of ecological efficiencies that describe the proportion of energy that is used for biomass production.

The primary output is a matrix of fluxes among the nodes of the food web. These fluxes can be used to describe the role of a species, a function of interest (e.g. predation; total fluxes to predators), multiple functions, or total energy flux (system throughow or multitrophic functioning). Additionally, the package includes functions to calculate network stability based on the Jacobian matrix, providing insight into how resilient the network is to small perturbations at steady state.

Overall, fluxweb provides a flexible set of functions that greatly increase the feasibility of implementing food‐web energetic approaches to more complex systems. As such, the package facilitates novel opportunities for mechanistically linking quantitative food webs and ecosystem functioning in real and dynamic natural landscapes.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Plant Sciences (IPS) > Plant Ecology
08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Plant Sciences (IPS)

UniBE Contributor:

Jochum, Malte

Subjects:

500 Science > 580 Plants (Botany)

ISSN:

2041-210X

Publisher:

Wiley-Blackwell

Language:

English

Submitter:

Peter Alfred von Ballmoos-Haas

Date Deposited:

19 Nov 2018 08:49

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:19

Publisher DOI:

10.1111/2041-210x.13109

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.121139

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/121139

Actions (login required)

Edit item Edit item
Provide Feedback