Reinterpreting the relationship between number of species and number of links connects community structure and stability

This is the first release of the code accompanying the paper: Carpentier et al. (2021). Reinterpreting the relationship between number of species and number of links connects community structure and stability. In Nature Ecology and Evolution. Read online or View at Publisher The code allows to (1) carry out in-silico extinction experiments, (2) estimate the shape of the link-species relationship for a given network and (3) compute the network's robustness and local stability. More information is available in the readme file (or on the Github repository)

Food web uncertainties influence predictions of climate change effects on soil carbon sequestration in heathlands

Carbon cycling models consider soil carbon sequestration a key process for climate change mitigation. However, these models mostly focus on abiotic soil processes and, despite its recognized critical mechanistic role, do not explicitly include interacting soil organisms. Here, we use a literature study to show that even a relatively simple soil community (heathland soils) contains large uncertainties in temporal and spatial food web structure. Next, we used a Lotka–Volterra-based food web model to demonstrate that, due to these uncertainties, climate change can either increase or decrease soil carbon sequestration to varying extents. Both the strength and direction of changes strongly depend on (1) the main consumer’s (enchytraeid worms) feeding preferences and (2) whether decomposers (fungi) or enchytraeid worms are more sensitive to stress. Hence, even for a soil community with a few dominant functional groups and a simulation model with a few parameters, filling these knowledge gaps is a critical first step towards the explicit integration of soil food web dynamics into carbon cycling models in order to better assess the role soils play in climate change mitigation

juergspaak/community_assembly: v1.0.0-alpha

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