Kevin S. McCann

TL;DR: This issue — commonly referred to as the diversity–stability debate — is the subject of this review, which synthesizes historical ideas with recent advances and concludes that declines in diversity should be expected to accelerate the simplification of ecological communities.

TL;DR: The results show that weak to intermediate strength links are important in promoting community persistence and stability, and data on interaction strengths in natural food webs indicate that food-web interaction strengths are indeed characterized by many weak interactions and a few strong interactions.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors developed an integrative framework for understanding the impact of detritus on food web dynamics, emphasizing the ontogeny and heterogeneity of detribus and the various ways that explicit inclusion of the detrital dynamics alters generalizations about the structure and functioning of food webs.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that real food webs are structured such that top predators act as couplers of distinct energy channels that differ in both productivity and turnover rate, and that coupled fast and slow channels convey both local and non-local stability to food webs.

TL;DR: This work couple fine-grained climate projections to thermal performance data from 38 ectothermic invertebrate species and contrast projections with those of a simple model to show that projections based on mean temperature change alone differ substantially from those incorporating changes to the variation, and to the mean and variation in concert.