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Alpine meadow; artificial warming; beetles; biodiversity and ecosystem function; Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau; China; coprophagy
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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A Brown-World Cascade In The Dung Decomposer Food Web Of An Alpine Meadow: Effects Of Predator Interactions And Warming, Xw Wu, Je Duffy, Pb Reich, Sc Sun
A Brown-World Cascade In The Dung Decomposer Food Web Of An Alpine Meadow: Effects Of Predator Interactions And Warming, Xw Wu, Je Duffy, Pb Reich, Sc Sun
VIMS Articles
Top-down control has been extensively documented in food webs based on living plants, where predator limitation of herbivores can cascade to facilitate plant growth (the green-world hypothesis), particularly in grasslands and aquatic systems. Yet the ecosystem role of predators in detrital food webs is less explored, as is the potential effect of climate warming on detritus-based communities. We here show that predators have a "brown-world" role in decomposer communities via a cascading top-down control on plant growth, based on the results of an experiment that factorially manipulated presence and size of two predator species as well as temperature (warmed vs. …