soilfoodwebs: An R package for analyzing and simulating food web dynamics

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

10:10 AM – 10:25 AM PT

Location: Vancouver Convention Centre, Meeting Room 211

Presenting Author(s)

RB

Robert Buchkowski

Canadian Forest Service
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

Co-Author(s)

Carlos Barreto

PhD
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada

Co-author(s)

ZL

Zoë Lindo

University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada

Soil food web models summarize the interactions between living organisms and their abiotic resources. They can calculate the contribution of individual taxa to aggregate processes like carbon and nitrogen mineralization. I will discuss soilfoodwebs, which is an R package designed to analyze soil food web models using data on organism biomass, feeding relationships, as well as basic physiological and life history parameters. I will demonstrate the calculated carbon and nitrogen fluxes for 16 published soil food web models and show how they provide insights into the effects of soil organisms on carbon and nitrogen loss. The analyses find that microbial taxa have large direct effects on nutrient cycling, while arthropods have sporadic indirect effects across the studied food webs. Then, I will demonstrate why simulations of these food web models are limited by our understanding of the population dynamics of soil organisms, specifically any uncertainty in the strength of density-dependence. Finally, I will apply soilfoodwebs to simple web based on non-native earthworms and their organic matter resources to demonstrate how we can use equilibrium models to explore variation across a forested landscape.