Community ecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    How aquatic communities influence biogeochemical cycling is not well understood. Here, Devlin et al.manipulate the abundance of fish in a whole-lake experiment and show that methane efflux is reduced by the presence of top predators, via a trophic cascade from zooplankton to methanotrophic bacteria.

    • Shawn P. Devlin
    • , Jatta Saarenheimo
    •  & Roger I. Jones

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Agricultural intensification may negatively impact biodiversity via a number of mechanisms. Here, Gámez-Virués et al.show that landscape simplification acts as an environmental filter to homogenise grassland arthropod communities into pools of species with less specialised functional traits.

    • Sagrario Gámez-Virués
    • , David J. Perović
    •  & Catrin Westphal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Both deterministic and stochastic processes likely contribute to the assembly of ecological communities. Here, Powell et al. measure soil microbial community and habitat turnover across Scotland and show that stochastic processes usually dominate the assembly of fungal but not bacterial communities.

    • Jeff R. Powell
    • , Senani Karunaratne
    •  & Brajesh K. Singh

  • Article |

    The formation of new feeding links by consumers adapting to the loss of prey is thought to buffer food webs against cascading extinctions. However, Ebenman et al.show that adaptive rewiring can still cause extinction cascades if predators are efficient at capturing rare prey, leading to overexploitation of resources.

    • David Gilljam
    • , Alva Curtsdotter
    •  & Bo Ebenman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear whether the emergence of new infectious diseases can be predicted. Here, Anthony et al. investigate viral communities in faeces of wild macaques and show that viral diversity is inherently structured, suggesting that it should be possible to forecast some changes in viral communities.

    • Simon J. Anthony
    • , Ariful Islam
    •  & W. Ian Lipkin

  • Article |

    Intraspecific variation is known to cascade evolutionary change down through food webs, although bottom-up changes are less well described. Here, Brodersenet al. show that life history change in a prey fish species, mediated through anthropogenic activity, can promote phenotypic diversification of its top predator.

    • Jakob Brodersen
    • , Jennifer G. Howeth
    •  & David M. Post

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some species of social bacteria can chemically modify their nutrient environments, which may influence community interactions. Here, McClean et al.show that changes at a single gene locus in a biofilm-forming bacteria can perturb community structure to the same extent as the loss of an apex predator.

    • Deirdre McClean
    • , Luke McNally
    •  & Ian Donohue

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multilevel societies are comprised of hierarchically nested levels of social organization, but how they arise is not well understood. Here Cantor et al. find that the emergence of sperm whale clans is more likely to be driven by cultural transmission of acoustic repertoires than via stochastic processes.

    • Maurício Cantor
    • , Lauren G. Shoemaker
    •  & Hal Whitehead

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climatic change is predicted to impact moisture-dependent ecosystems. Here Carroll et al. show that a combination of physical, biophysical and ecosystem processes determine the abundance and distribution of three bird species that feed on craneflies in blanket bogs.

    • Matthew J. Carroll
    • , Andreas Heinemeyer
    •  & Chris D. Thomas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the dynamics of empirical food webs is of central importance for predicting the stability of ecological communities. Here Allesina et al.derive an approximation to accurately predict the stability of large food webs whose structure is built using the cascade model.

    • Stefano Allesina
    • , Jacopo Grilli
    •  & Amos Maritan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How mechanisms underlying food-web stability may influence ecosystem regime shifts is not well understood. Combining food-web and ecosystem modelling, Kuiperet al. show that destabilizing reorganization of a small number of key trophic interactions precede catastrophic changes in shallow lake ecosystems.

    • Jan J. Kuiper
    • , Cassandra van Altena
    •  & Wolf M. Mooij

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influence of functional group diversity on food web structure is less well known than that of biodiversity. Analysing species interactions in a network of salt marsh islands, Montoya et al. show that functional group diversity is higher in more modular networks and varies spatially across the archipelago.

    • D. Montoya
    • , M.L. Yallop
    •  & J. Memmott

  • Article |

    Most studies investigating the biodiversity–stability hypothesis have focused on disturbances that induce productivity losses. Using data from a 200–year flood event in a grassland biodiversity experiment, Wright et al. show that disturbances that increase productivity can also drive decreased stability.

    • Alexandra J. Wright
    • , Anne Ebeling
    •  & Nico Eisenhauer

  • Article |

    Species responses to climatic change are likely to be complex, acting across multiple trophic levels and life stages. Here the authors show that Arctic charr are negatively impacted by trophic mismatches affecting both juveniles and fry, which may be responsible for recent poor catches of this fish.

    • Tomas Jonsson
    •  & Malin Setzer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Certain soil fungi form specialized cellular structures or 'traps' to feed on nematodes, which in turn eat bacteria. Here, the authors show that urea released from bacteria induces trap formation in the fungi and this promotes nematode elimination.

    • Xin Wang
    • , Guo-Hong Li
    •  & Ke-Qin Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transformation of natural ecosystems into agricultural land is usually accompanied by extensive biodiversity loss. Calculating multitrophic energy fluxes, Barnes et al.report severe reductions of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning from tropical rainforest to oil-palm plantations.

    • Andrew D. Barnes
    • , Malte Jochum
    •  & Ulrich Brose

  • Article |

    Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are crucial for immune response, yet it is unclear what shapes their diversity at a community level. Here, the authors show that indirect effects among rodent hosts and their helminth parasites can play a crucial role in shaping host MHC diversity.

    • Shai Pilosof
    • , Miguel A. Fortuna
    •  & Jordi Bascompte

  • Article |

    Identification of virus–host pairs requires cultivation, otherwise it is based on tentative assignment using genomic signatures. Here, the authors describe a method that can unambiguously assign viruses to hosts and does not require their cultivation.

    • Manuel Martínez-García
    • , Fernando Santos
    •  & Josefa Antón

  • Article |

    The Western Antarctic Peninsular is subject to climate change, including increased winter temperatures and melting sea ice. In this study, the authors demonstrate that climate change in this area effects bacteria and phytoplankton levels, which culminates in an altered diet for the apex predator, the Adélie penguin.

    • Grace K. Saba
    • , William R. Fraser
    •  & Oscar M. Schofield

  • Article |

    Linking biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been a longstanding challenge in ecology. Here, the authors demonstrate that changes in the demographic structure of populations can fundamentally alter the functional composition of natural communities and alter ecosystem processes long before any species are extirpated.

    • Volker H. W. Rudolf
    •  & Nick L. Rasmussen

  • Article |

    The analysis of food web properties under different environmental conditions informs us how the ecosystem functions. Here, Tunneyet al. use post-glacial lakes as model ecosystems to show how macroscopic patterns of food webs vary with changes in habitat and resource accessibility.

    • Tyler D. Tunney
    • , Kevin S. McCann
    •  & Brian J. Shuter

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