Global change is reconfiguring food webs, but efforts to predict and mitigate the consequences of change are underdeveloped because data often lack sufficient taxonomic and spatiotemporal resolution. African savannas are among the last food webs containing intact large mammalian herbivore (LMH) assemblages, yet there is uncertainty about the future resilience of these food webs due to high human population and livestock growth rates, severe drought and climate change, and wildlife population collapses. In order to develop the highly resolved food webs required to address these shortcomings, we reconstructed plant-herbivore interactions in a biodiverse Kenyan food web with species-level precision using DNA metabarcoding.
Results/Conclusions
We obtained ~1000 dietary profiles using dung samples from 23 LMH species that range in size from 5-kg dik-dik to 5000-kg elephant. Together, these herbivores consumed ~150 plant species from >30 plant families. At least some LMH species exhibited fundamental shifts in dietary composition under conditions of resource scarcity, especially in terms of their specificity for plant functional types. These results suggest that future food web fragility could hinge upon the responses of specific plant lineages to environmental change.