Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 1SA, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2010 Jul 12;365(1549):2081-91. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0011.
Few models concern how environmental variables such as temperature affect community structure. Here, we develop a model of how temperature affects food web connectance, a powerful driver of population dynamics and community structure. We use the Arrhenius equation to add temperature dependence of foraging traits to an existing model of food web structure. The model predicts potentially large temperature effects on connectance. Temperature-sensitive food webs exhibit slopes of up to 0.01 units of connectance per 1 degrees C change in temperature. This corresponds to changes in diet breadth of one resource item per 2 degrees C (assuming a food web containing 50 species). Less sensitive food webs exhibit slopes down to 0.0005, which corresponds to about one resource item per 40 degrees C. Relative sizes of the activation energies of attack rate and handling time determine whether warming increases or decreases connectance. Differences in temperature sensitivity are explained by differences between empirical food webs in the body size distributions of organisms. We conclude that models of temperature effects on community structure and dynamics urgently require considerable development, and also more and better empirical data to parameterize and test them.
很少有模型关注环境变量（如温度）如何影响群落结构。在这里，我们开发了一个模型，用于研究温度如何影响食物网连接度，这是影响种群动态和群落结构的强大驱动力。我们使用阿累尼乌斯方程（Arrhenius equation）将觅食特征的温度依赖性添加到现有的食物网结构模型中。该模型预测了温度对连接度的潜在影响。对温度敏感的食物网表现出斜率高达每摄氏度 0.01 个连接度单位的变化。这相当于每 2 摄氏度改变一种资源的饮食宽度（假设食物网中包含 50 个物种）。敏感性较低的食物网的斜率可低至 0.0005，这相当于每 40 摄氏度改变一种资源。攻击率和处理时间的激活能的相对大小决定了变暖是增加还是减少连接度。生物体的体型分布方面的经验性食物网之间的差异解释了温度敏感性的差异。我们的结论是，迫切需要对温度对群落结构和动态的影响模型进行大量的开发，并且还需要更多和更好的经验数据来对其进行参数化和测试。
