A cross-ecosystem comparison of the strength of trophic cascades

By Jonathan B. Shurin, Elizabeth T. Borer, Eric W. Seabloom, K. Anderson, Carol Blanchette, Bernardo R. Broitman, S. D. Cooper, B. Halpern. 2002

971 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although trophic cascades (indirect effects of predators on plants via herbivores) occur in a wide variety of food webs, the magnitudes of their effects are often quite variable. We compared the responses of herbivore and plant communities to predator manipulations in 102 field experiments in six different ecosystems: lentic ( lake and pond), marine, and stream benthos, lentic and marine plankton, and terrestrial (grasslands and agricultural fields). Predator effects varied considerably among systems and were strongest in lentic and marine benthos and weakest in marine plankton and terrestrial food webs. Predator effects on herbivores were generally larger and more variable than on plants, suggesting that cascades often become attenuated at the plant‐ herbivore interface. Top-down control of plant biomass was stronger in water than on land; however, the differences among the five aquatic food webs were as great as those between wet and dry systems.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35d412104f6452a95e2f25f38ba9a9046c70e826

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Citations in the corpus

Coral reef cascades and the indirect effects of predator removal by exploitation (2004, background): “Exploitation is thought to influence ecosystems via trophic cascades where predator removal results in elevated prey abundance, which in turn influences the base of the food web (Kitchell & Carpenter 1993; Pace et al. 1999; Pinnegar et al. 2000; Shurin et al. 2002).”
Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function Research: Is It Relevant to Conservation? (2005, background): “For example, the effects on plant biomass of removing a top trophic level (Shurin et al. 2002) have been argued to be comparable to the effects of drastic reductions in plant diversity (Duffy 2003).”
Experimental evidence for alternative stable equilibria in a benthic pond food web (2003, background): “True alternative stable equilibria have been discussed in several contexts related to community and ecosystems ecology: (1) Alternative densities or dynamical trajectories of a group of coexisting species can occur under differing initial conditions; here, the identity of species remains the same, b”
Grazer diversity effects on ecosystem functioning in seagrass beds (2003, background): “…involved are common in a variety of ecosystems, emphasizing that successfully predicting ecosystem-level consequences of eroding biodiversity, particularly in aquatic systems with strong top-down forcing (Cyr & Pace 1993; Shurin et al. 2002), will require close attention to food-web interactions.”
Ecosystem consequences of diversity depend on food chain length in estuarine vegetation (2005, background): “First, a more diverse consumer assemblage can use available resources more efficiently, and thus exert stronger control on the resource (e.g. Tilman et al. 1997; Stachowicz et al. 2002).”
Interactive and cumulative effects of multiple human stressors in marine systems. (2008, background): “…and nutrient addition, although this analysis averaged across ecosystem types, which have been shown to respond differently to multiple stressors (Shurin et al. 2002, Gruner et al. 2008), and differs from our analysis here in that they measured interaction effects between direct and indirect…”