Evie A. Wieters

TL;DR: A conceptual framework is proposed that organises this diversity of non-trophic interactions observed in nature into three main functional classes defined by how they modify specific parameters in a dynamic food web model and offers a new perspective on tackling ecological complexity.

TL;DR: Evaluating the effects of variation in wind-driven upwelling on community regulation along 900 km of coastline of the southeastern Pacific finds that geographically discontinuous oceanographic regimes set bounds to the strength of species interactions and define distinct regions for the design and implementation of sustainable management and conservation policies.

TL;DR: Co-occurrence networks provide information about the joint spatial effects of environmental conditions, recruitment, and, to some extent, biotic interactions, and among the latter, they tend to better detect niche-expanding positive non-trophic interactions.

TL;DR: The results suggest that non-trophic interactions exhibit highly nonrandom structures both alone and with respect to food web structure, which suggests a path forward for developing a more comprehensive ecological network theory to predict the functioning and resilience of ecological communities.

TL;DR: This work provides a first glimpse at what the full “entangled bank” of species looks like and suggests that this non-random patterning of how diverse non-trophic interactions map onto the food web could allow for higher species persistence and higher total biomass than expected by chance and promote a higher robustness to extinctions.