Networking nutrients: integrating nutrients into networks to investigate the drivers and structures of entomological interactions

Jordan Cuff

The ecological interactions of insects and other invertebrates are crucial for ecosystem services like biocontrol and pollination, and they form the fundamental building blocks of functional ecosystems. Nutrients are a crucial driver of ecological interactions but remain poorly integrated into ecological network analyses despite the immense potential for understanding the structuring of interactions gained through the consilience of nutritional and network ecology. Concepts like nutrient-specific foraging have the potential to explain the mechanisms structuring complex ecological systems, and nutrients may help to guide predictions of dynamic processes, such as interaction rewiring and extinction cascades.

In this talk, I will present the concept of nutritional networks and demonstrate this approach with an empirical spider-prey network. I will show how networks can be constructed with nutritional data and how this can illuminate the way in which nutrients structure ecological networks in natural systems. I will highlight pertinent ecological topics which could be advanced in a nutritional network context, including nutritional niche differentiation, functional responses, ecological invasions and ecosystem robustness. By integrating nutritional data and ecological networks, significant advances can be made to our understanding of ecological processes from individual to ecosystem scales.