Tuesday, August 3, 2010: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
303-304, David L Lawrence Convention Center
OOS 9 - Spatial Food Web Ecology: Toward a Mechanistic Landscape Ecology
A recent breakthrough in community ecology has come from the emergence of the metacommunity concept. A metacommunity is a regional set of local communities connected by dispersal of individuals. This concept holds that species coexistence, at both local and regional scales, is influenced by the interaction of two processes previously considered separately: dispersal among local communities, and competition within local communities. Through this synthesis, the theory and its empirical tests are yielding new insights into how communities are structured at multiple spatial scales. However, two major weaknesses of metacommunity theory are that (1) they mostly focus on competitive interactions within a single trophic level, and that (2) they assume that species perceive the scale of habitat patchiness the same way. Although there is a large body of work on predator-prey interactions in space, most of these studies consider interactions between a few species instead of larger food webs. Closer attention has recently been paid to how individual movement across habitats affects multi-trophic dynamics. However, these studies have not been well integrated into the metacommunity concept. Spatial differences between trophic levels have been recognized, but poorly integrated into the metacommunity. In reality, species, particularly those belonging to different trophic levels, vary greatly in mobility and longevity, and therefore in how they perceive spatial scale. The goal of this symposium is to synthesize our current understanding of trophic interactions and expand it to differing spatial scales toward a new multi-trophic metacommunity concept. This landscape-scale perspective enables us to ask a vast array of novel questions: How do we incorporate variation among trophic levels in the perception of scale into the metacommunity concept? How do we incorporate across-habitat resource subsidies to expand the metacommunity concept to ecosystems? How environmental heterogeneity and food web structure combine to affect species distribution? Will classical predictions for local food webs, such as those on the complexity-stability relationship or trophic cascades, hold in spatialized food webs? The symposium will bring together researchers with a range of expertise to tackle these questions. The program combines the presentation of new models of multi-trophic food webs in space and analysis of existing and new datasets, including experimental manipulations of metacommunity structure.
Organizer:	Dominique Gravel, Université du Québec à Rimouski
Co-organizer:	Nicolas Mouquet, Université Montpellier 2, CNRS
Moderator:	Tadashi Fukami, Standord University
8:00 AM	OOS 9-1		Recasting spatial food web ecology as an ecosystem science François Massol, CEMAGREF
8:20 AM	OOS 9-2		Effects of dispersal on local extinction risk in multi-trophic metacommunities Anna C. Eklöf, University of Chicago
8:40 AM	OOS 9-3		A meta-analysis of the effects of landscape complexity on pest control Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, University of California, Berkeley, Megan E. O'Rourke, Cornell University, Eleanor J. Blitzer, University of California, Berkeley, Claire Kremen, University of California, Berkeley
9:00 AM	OOS 9-4		Primary production and biomass turnover rates determine the relative importance of energy channels in food webs Colette L. Ward, University of Guelph, Kevin S. McCann, University of Guelph
9:20 AM	OOS 9-5		Group structure of the Serengeti food web: An analysis using Bayesian inference and model selection Edward B. Baskerville, University of Michigan, Stefano Allesina, University of Chicago, Mercedes Pascual, University of Michigan AND Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Andy P. Dobson, Princeton University
9:40 AM			Break
9:50 AM	OOS 9-6		Synchrony and stability of food webs in metacommunities Tarik C. Gouhier, McGill University, Frédéric Guichard, McGill University, Andrew Gonzalez, McGill
10:10 AM	OOS 9-7		Landscape theory for food web architecture Kevin S. McCann, University of Guelph, Neil Rooney, University of Guelph
10:30 AM	OOS 9-8		Emergence of food webs in space and time Michel Loreau, McGill University
10:50 AM	OOS 9-9		Trophic theory of island biogeography Dominique Gravel, Université du Québec à Rimouski, François Massol, CEMAGREF, Elsa Flore Canard, Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier, David Mouillot, Université Montpellier 2, Nicolas Mouquet, Université Montpellier 2, CNRS
11:10 AM	OOS 9-10		Experiments in spatial food webs: caveats and future directions Mathew Leibold, University of Texas at Austin

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