000			03105 am a22002893u 4500
042			_adc
100	1	0	_aGaliana, Núria _eauthor _91998
700	1	0	_aBarros, Ceres _eauthor _91999
700	1	0	_aBraga, João _eauthor _92000
700	1	0	_aFicetola, Gentile Francesco _eauthor _92001
700	1	0	_aMaiorano, Luigi _eauthor _92002
700	1	0	_aThuiller, Wilfried _eauthor _92003
700	1	0	_aMontoya, José M. _eauthor _92004
700	1	0	_aLurgi, Miguel _eauthor _92005
245	0	0	_aThe spatial scaling of food web structure across European biogeographical regions
260			_c2021-05.
500			_a/pmc/articles/PMC7614028/
500			_a/pubmed/36620425
520			_aThe species-area relationship (SAR) is one of the most well-established scaling patterns in ecology. Its implications for understanding how communities change across spatial gradients are numerous, including the effects of habitat loss on biodiversity. However, ecological communities are not mere collections of species. They are the result of interactions between these species forming complex networks that tie them together. Should we aim to grasp the spatial scaling of biodiversity as a whole, it is fundamental to understand the changes in the structure of interaction networks with area. In spite of a few empirical and theoretical studies that address this challenge, we still do not know much about how network structure changes with area, or what are the main environmental drivers of these changes. Here, using the meta-network of potential interactions between all terrestrial vertebrates in Europe (1140 species and 67 201 feeding interactions), we analysed network-area relationships (NARs) that summarize how network properties scale with area. We do this across ten biogeographical regions, which differ in environmental characteristics. We found that the spatial scaling of network complexity strongly varied across biogeographical regions. However, once the variation in SARs was accounted for, differences in the shape of NARs vanished. On the other hand, the proportion of species across trophic levels remained remarkably constant across biogeographical regions and spatial scales, despite the great variation in species richness. Spatial variation in mean annual temperature and habitat clustering were the main environmental determinants of the shape of both SARs and NARs across Europe. Our results suggest new avenues in the exploration of the effects of environmental factors on the spatial scaling of biodiversity. We argue that NARs can provide new insights to analyse and understand ecological communities.
540			_a
540			_ahttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
546			_aen
690			_aArticle
655	7		_aText _2local
786	0		_nEcography
856	4	1	_uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecog.05229 _zConnect to this object online.
999			_c374 _d374