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

该项目非常符合“生物多样性和生态系统功能”和“生态系统”的主题。食物网是我们理解生态群落、识别生态关系以及探索物种损失和其他压力源如何影响生态系统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。食物网指标的重要性反映在他们的使用作为描述符，以实现良好的环境状况的海洋环境根据欧盟海洋战略框架指令（MSFD）。这个博士项目解决了一个重大的和持续的差距，在我们的生态社区的知识，作为世界上一半的物种-寄生虫-经常被忽略在食物网分析的实际和概念上的原因。在过去的20年里，寄生虫甚至只在食物网文献中被考虑过。鉴于寄生链接的普遍存在，它们仍然非常不受重视。在Web of Science上简单搜索“食物网”会产生35.965篇出版物，将“寄生虫”添加到搜索中会将出版物数量减少到仅799篇。通过解决这一知识差距，博士生有很大的机会在这里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）还是在实践中（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边界的综合概念。气候变化以及其他人为压力因素已被证明会造成诸如物种分布范围扩大/迁移等影响，只有在生态系统的复杂性得到全面定量描述的情况下，才能理解和预测这些影响。一个既定的新方法，包括寄生虫在食物网和证明其有效性将提供一个翻译的概念方法，可应用于任何生态系统之间的流域和海岸。

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.