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Interspecific interactions in ecological communities are the main mechanisms that determine structure, functioning, and stability of ecosystems (May, 1972, 1973; Neutel et al., 2002; Alessina and Tang, 2012; Mougi and Kondoh, 2012, 2014). These interactions can be qualitatively positive, negative, or neutral, and pairs of these interactions between two species may be of opposite sign (e.g., trophic, parasitic) or of equivalent sign (e.g., mutualistic, competitive). Most of the research on ecological interactions has focused on feeding relations (Odum, 1971; Pimm, 1982; Levin et al., 2009; McCann, 2011; Moore and de Ruiter, 2012), but in recent studies of ecological communities this was extended to parasitic (Huxham et al., 1995; Thompson et al., 2004; Lafferty et al., 2006; Kuris et al., 2008) and non-parasitic non-trophic relations (Thebault and Fountaine, 2010; Fontaine et al., 2011; Kéfi et al., 2012; Mougi and Kondoh, 2012; Sauve et al., 2014). In this chapter, we focus on parasitic relations and notably on the question of how trophic interactions and infectious agents mutually influence each other. Here we will refer to the combined classes of infectious species as parasites (see next section for details). The impact of parasites in an ecological community can be quantified through their direct influence on the food-web structure, as well as more indirectly through the way they influence physiological traits of host species and trophic relations of the host and non-host species (Kéfi et al., 2012; Selakovic et al., 2014). In this chapter we first briefly discuss the diversity of parasitic interactions, their relationships with host and non-host species, as well as their effects on a simple consumer–resource relationship consisting of one host and one non-host species. The largest part of the chapter is devoted to exploring a basic model, to show how intricately ecological and epidemiological effects are interwoven, even in the simplest possible ecosystem consisting of two species. Even though this model is basic in the sense that it is low dimensional and not meant to realistically represent any particular system, the analysis does hint at broader ecological insight, for example into possible differences between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems based on parasitic interaction. The simple analysis highlights the need to study the link between ecology and infectious disease epidemiology in more realistic models.

Introduction Food-web models, which depict the trophic relationships between organisms within a community, form a powerful and versatile approach to study the relationships between community structure and ecosystem functioning. Although food-web models have recently been applied to a wide range of ecological studies (Memmott, 2009; Sanders et al., 2014), such approaches can be greatly improved by introducing high-resolution trophic information from empirical studies and experiments that realistically describe topological structure and energy flows (de Ruiter et al., 2005). Over the last decades major technological advances have been made in empirically characterizing trophic networks by describing, in detail, the connectedness and flows in food webs. Existing empirical techniques, such as stable isotope probing (SIP) (Layman et al., 2012), have been refined and new approaches have been created by combining methods, e.g., combining Raman spectroscopy or fatty acid analysis with SIP (Ruess et al., 2005a; Li et al., 2013). These empirical methods can provide insight into different aspects of food webs and together form an extensive toolbox to investigate trophic interactions. It is crucial to recognize the potential and limitations of a range of empirical approaches in order to choose the right method in the design of empirically based food-web studies. Empirically based food webs are generally classified according to the type of input information that is required. In the following lines we will provide an overview of four types of food-web model: connectedness webs, semi-quantitative webs, energy-flow webs, and functional webs. Paine (1980) introduced three of those webs, which are widely accepted and applied in food-web studies across ecosystems. We propose to add a fourth type of empirically based food web, the semi-quantitative web. All of these food webs have the same basic structure, but the conceptual webs differ in the type of trophic information they describe and represent (Figure 16.1). Connectedness webs (Figure 16.1a) define the basic structure of a food web by describing the food-web connections per se.

Many systems being studied today are dynamic, large and complex: traffic at an airport with 100 planes, slum areas with 10 4 persons or the human brain with 10 10 neuron(e)s. In such systems, stability is of central importance, for instability usually appears as a self-generating catastrophe. Unfortunately, present theoretical knowledge of stability in large systems is meager: the work described here was intended to add to it. Gardner and Ashby (1970) A variety of ecologically interesting interpretations can be, and have been, attached to the term “stability.” May (1973) Climate change, eutrophication, land-use practices, deforestation, intensification of agriculture, and harvesting from fisheries are changing ecosystems across the globe. The study of food webs provides a framework to address these environmental challenges. Food webs are descriptions of the trophic interactions among consumers and resources. The information contained within these descriptions includes aspects of ecosystem structure (i.e., species richness, network architecture), ecosystem function (i.e., primary production, decomposition, biogeochemical cycles), and dynamics (i.e., population and process rates and change, stability and persistence) that all ecosystems share. Understanding how food webs respond to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, be they gradual or abrupt, is important to our basic knowledge of systems, to the formulation of environmental policies, and the implementation of management practices. Ecologists have long understood the observed patterns in distribution of species and their biomass resulted in part from offsetting processes of births and death, immigration and emigration, competition for resources, production and predation, and basic energetic properties, and that they were in some way related to their stability or ability to persist (Elton, 1927; Lotka, 1956; Hutchison, 1959; Hairston et al., 1960; Paine, 1966). In the past 50 years, there have been several attempts to tie structural, functional, and dynamic aspects of ecosystems together in a unifying way. Two contemporary works: one from the community ecology perspective provided by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) – The Theory of Island Biogeography – and one from the ecosystem ecology perspective provided by Odum (1969) – “The strategy of ecosystem development” – summarized the thinking at that time. The Theory of Island Biogeography offered a fresh perspective that blended nearly a century of empirical data on the distribution of species across the globe collected by naturalists with mathematical representations of the processes of colonization and extinction to explain these observations.

Plant species diversity in Eurasian wetlands and grasslands depends not only on productivity but also on the relative availability of nutrients, particularly of nitrogen and phosphorus. Here we show that the impacts of nitrogen:phosphorus stoichiometry on plant species richness can be explained by selected plant life-history traits, notably by plant investments in growth versus reproduction. In 599 Eurasian sites with herbaceous vegetation we examined the relationship between the local nutrient conditions and community-mean life-history traits. We found that compared with plants in nitrogen-limited communities, plants in phosphorus-limited communities invest little in sexual reproduction (for example, less investment in seed, shorter flowering period, longer lifespan) and have conservative leaf economy traits (that is, a low specific leaf area and a high leaf dry-matter content). Endangered species were more frequent in phosphorus-limited ecosystems and they too invested little in sexual reproduction. The results provide new insight into how plant adaptations to nutrient conditions can drive the distribution of plant species in natural ecosystems and can account for the vulnerability of endangered species. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited.

Micro-organismen spelen een sleutelrol in bodemfuncties zoals de kringlopen van koolstof en stikstof. Voor een duurzame landbouw is het van belang dat deze kringlopen optimaal functioneren om verliezen van nutriënten zoveel mogelijk te voorkomen. Dit onderzoek geeft inzicht in de rol van bodemmicroben bij optimalisatie van de stikstofkringloop door toevoeging van zowel minerale kunstmest als verschillende kwaliteiten organisch materiaal.

A common approach to analyse stability of biological communities is to calculate the interaction strength matrix. Problematic in this approach is defining intraspecific interaction strengths, represented by diagonal elements in the matrix, due to a lack of empirical data for these strengths. Theoretical studies have shown that an overall increase in these strengths enhances stability. However, the way in which the pattern in intraspecific interaction strengths, i.e. the variation in these strengths between species, influences stability has received little attention. We constructed interaction strength matrices for 11 real soil food webs in which four patterns for intraspecific interaction strengths were chosen, based on the ecological literature. These patterns included strengths that were (1) similar for all species, (2) trophic level dependent, (3) biomass dependent, or (4) death rate dependent. These four patterns were analysed for their influence on (1) ranking food webs by their stability and (2) the response in stability to variation of single interspecific interaction strengths. The first analysis showed that ranking the 11 food webs by their stability was not strongly influenced by the choice of diagonal pattern. In contrast, the second analysis showed that the response of food web stability to variation in single interspecific interaction strengths was sensitive to the choice of diagonal pattern. Notably, stability could increase using one pattern and decrease using another. This result asks for deliberate approaches to choose diagonal element values in order to make predictions on how particular species, interactions, or other food web parameters affect food web stability.

The art historian does also write art criticism in Dutch newspapers and journals. This is a new development in Dutch criticism in the 1960's and 70's.

The critical reception in the sixties and seventies of such important artforms such as pop, new realism, zero, conceptual art