Habitat modification alters the structure of tropical host–parasitoid food webs

By J. Tylianakis, T. Tscharntke, O. Lewis. Nature, 2007

923 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global conversion of natural habitats to agriculture has led to marked changes in species diversity and composition. However, it is less clear how habitat modification affects interactions among species. Networks of feeding interactions (food webs) describe the underlying structure of ecological communities, and might be crucially linked to their stability and function. Here, we analyse 48 quantitative food webs for cavity-nesting bees, wasps and their parasitoids across five tropical habitat types. We found marked changes in food-web structure across the modification gradient, despite little variation in species richness. The evenness of interaction frequencies declined with habitat modification, with most energy flowing along one or a few pathways in intensively managed agricultural habitats. In modified habitats there was a higher ratio of parasitoid to host species and increased parasitism rates, with implications for the important ecosystem services, such as pollination and biological control, that are performed by host bees and wasps. The most abundant parasitoid species was more specialized in modified habitats, with reduced attack rates on alternative hosts. Conventional community descriptors failed to discriminate adequately among habitats, indicating that perturbation of the structure and function of ecological communities might be overlooked in studies that do not document and quantify species interactions. Altered interaction structure therefore represents an insidious and functionally important hidden effect of habitat modification by humans.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f4d16e8dd62033727545a6be6c367bdd761dd01

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Citations in the corpus

Network analysis in conservation biogeography: challenges and opportunities (2010, background): “Similarly, Tylianakis et al. (2007) have shown how human modification can alter interaction networks in host–parasitoid systems, with implications for pollination.”
The Structure of Ecological Networks Across Levels of Organization (2020, background): “…are built over millions of years, are now being rapidly disrupted and reshaped by species extinctions and invasions promoted by human activity (Aizen et al. 2012, Bartley et al. 2019, Mendoza & Araújo 2019, Trøjelsgaard et al. 2019, Tylianakis et al. 2007, Valido et al. 2019,Worm & Paine 2016).”
Analysing ecological networks of species interactions (2018, background): “…spatial and temporal variation in ecological networks, and associating these variations to environmental factors, may yield insights into the underlying changes in ecosystem functions, emergent properties, and robustness to extinction and invasion (Tylianakis et al. 2007; Tylianakis & Binzer 2013).”
Conservation and restoration of plant–animal mutualisms on oceanic islands (2010, background): “009.10.002 that were shown by Tylianakis et al. (2007) in antagonistic host– parasitoid networks.”
Conservation of species interaction networks (2010, background): “Frequency distributions can simply be plotted, or incorporated in metrics such as interaction evenness (Tylianakis et al., 2007).”
Defining invasiveness and invasibility in ecological networks (2016, background): “The peak of positive invasion fitness corresponds to the first quarter of the period and the optimal trait for resource consumption (r = l = 2) of species in the network (Tylianakis et al. 2007 ).”