Beyond the Frontier: Predation and Prediction
Ecologists have long recognized the importance of predators in structuring ecological systems, but recent research demonstrates that changes in predator richness – the diversity of predator species, genotypes, and functional assemblages in an ecosystem – may also strongly affect the composition of and population dynamics within ecological communities. In “Cascading effects of predator richness”, a paper published in the December issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, John Bruno and Bradley Cardinale discuss the vital role that predator richness plays in maintaining these communities and their properties, the difficulty in predicting community impacts as a result of changes in predator diversity, and the implications of such changes for biodiversity theory and ecosystem management.
