Dear members of the Philosophical Transactions B editorial board,
On behalf of my co-authors, I am pleased to submit our manuscript entitled "Spatially explicit predictions of food web structure from regional level data" for publication as a Research article. We believe our manuscript will greatly contribute to the theme issue Connected interactions: enriching food web research by spatial and social interactions as we present a framework to downscale regional-level food webs (metawebs) into finer scale, spatially explicit networks.
Documenting the diversity and variability of food web systems across large spatial extents can be a challenging task, especially in systems with hundreds of species and tens of thousand of potentially interacting species pair. Focusing instead on inferring metawebs—lists of potential interactions in a given species pool—offers reasonable approximations of the network existing within a region. Those can later be downscaled into local predictions, yet a challenge remains in how to properly account for interaction variability across space. Here, we present a downscaling framework which uses a probabilistic metaweb (the Canadian mammal metaweb) and species occurrences from GBIF to generate spatially explicit network and community predictions, with the added benefit of accounting for the variability of interactions between ecoregions.
Using our approach for Canada, we found mismatches in the distribution of species richness and interactions, highlighting that interactions might vary differently than species distributions even over continental-scale gradients. Moreover, variation between and within ecoregions was not constant across space and can lead to contrasting diversity hotspots for richness and interactions. Given the recent developments of global and broad scale metawebs, our method has the potential to be used in many systems to generate local and actionable predictions, and thus increase the diversity of ecological networks that can be projected in space.
This work has not been previously published and is not being considered by any other journal. It appeared as a preprint on ==EcoEvoRxiv with the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.32942/X2TW2S. All authors agree with the manuscript content and its submission to the journal. The authors declare no conflict of interest.
We look forward to your editorial decision on this manuscript.