The Effects Of Parasites On Food Web Structure And Dynamics: New Ways To Improve Accuracy And Ecological Realism

拟议的项目非常符合“生物多样性和生态系统功能”和“挑战生态系统”的主题。食物网是我们理解生态群落、识别生态关系、探索物种损失和其他压力因素如何影响生态系统的恢复力和持久性的基础，因为它们描述了支撑生态系统的脚手架。根据欧盟海洋战略框架指令（MSFD），食物网指标被用作描述物，以实现海洋环境的良好环境状态，这反映了食物网指标的重要性。这个博士项目解决了我们对生态群落知识的一个主要和持久的差距，因为世界上一半的物种——寄生虫——由于实际和概念上的原因，在食物网分析中经常被忽略。在过去的20年里，寄生虫在食物网文献中才被考虑到。鉴于寄生虫联系的普遍存在，它们的代表性仍然很低。在Web of Science上简单搜索“食物网”，得到35.965份出版物，加上“寄生虫”，出版物数量减少到只有799份。通过解决这一知识差距，博士生在这里有一个很好的机会来影响食物网和生态系统研究领域，无论是在概念上（包括寄生虫）还是在实践上（计划对可能的eDNA方法进行试点研究）。食物网是跨越物种和生态系统之间任意界限的综合概念。气候变化以及其他人为压力因素已被证明会导致物种范围扩大/移动等影响，只有在生态系统能够全面定量描述的情况下才能理解和预测。一种将寄生虫纳入食物网并证明其有效性的已建立的新方法将提供一种可应用于集水区和海岸之间存在的任何生态系统的转化概念方法。

The proposed project fits strongly within the 'Biodiversity and ecosystem function' and 'Challenged ecosystems' themes.Food webs are fundamental to our understanding of ecological communities, to identifying ecological relationships and to exploring how species loss and other stressors affect ecosystem resilience and persistence, as they describe the scaffolding that supports ecosystems. The importance of food web indicators is reflected in their utilization as descriptor to achieve Good Environmental Status for marine environments under the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive(MSFD).This PhD project addresses a major and persistent gap in our knowledge of ecological communities, as half of the world's species -parasites -are routinely ignored in food web analyses for practical and conceptual reasons. Parasites have only even been considered in the food web literature for the past 20 years. Given the ubiquity of parasite links they remain very under-represented. A simple search on Web of Science for 'food web' yields 35.965 publications, adding 'parasite' to the search reduces publication numbers to only 799.By addressing this gap of knowledge, the PhD student has a great opportunity here to influence the field of food web and ecosystem research, both in a conceptual (inclusion of parasites) and practical way (planned pilot study on possible eDNA approaches). Food webs are integrative concepts that cross-arbitrary boundaries between species and ecosystems. Climate change as well as other anthropogenic stressors have been shown to cause effects such as species range expansion/movement and can only be understood and predicted if ecosystems can be described quantitatively in their full complexity. An established novel method of including parasites in food webs and proof of its effectiveness will provide a translational concept approach that could be applied to any ecosystem present between catchment and coast.