Taylor Brubaker
Pronouns: He/Him/His
UROP Fellowship: Community College Summer Fellowship Program
Washtenaw Community College
Research Mentor(s): Kayla Hale, PhD Candidate
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Presentation Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 | Session 3 | Presenter: 2
Authors: Kayla R. S. Hale, Taylor R. Brubaker, Fernanda S. Valdovinos
Abstract
Food webs are ecological networks that describe the trophic interactions among species in a specific habitat. The most abundant, highly resolved, published food webs are of aquatic habitats. However, to date, there have been only poorly resolved terrestrial food webs. Terrestrial food webs have long been deemed too overwhelming or too ambitious due to the sheer size of the number of species found within a specific habitat. Current network analysis of food webs is constrained by the resolution of the food web itself and not by ecological factors. Here, we report a highly resolved terrestrial food web for the U-M Biological Station (BioStation). First, we assembled a list of every species found within the BioStation using data collected by students over many years. Then, we collected diet, predator, seed dispersal and pollination information for individual species using expert knowledge and online resources including Animal Diversity Web, iNaturalist, and Discover Life. So far, we have collected information for 702 species including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and a subset of insects. We unveiled gaps in the dietary information available at the species level. Finally, we visualized the food web in MATLAB and used network analysis to identify patterns in its architecture. Our results thus far show that the BioStation terrestrial food web is the most resolved to date. Once the entire food web is complete, the network can be compared to other ecological networks and subsets can be compared against one another. In particular, we will test the hypothesis that network architecture is robust across taxonomic resolutions.
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Research Disciplines
Natural Sciences, Life Sciences
