The Effects Of Parasites On Food Web Structure And Dynamics: New Ways To Improve Accuracy And Ecological Realism

The proposed project fits strongly within the 'Biodiversity and ecosystem function' and 'Challenged ecosystems' themes.

Food webs are fundamental to our understanding of ecological communities, to identifying ecological relationships and to exploring how species loss and other stressors affect ecosystem resilience and persistence, as they describe the scaffolding that supports ecosystems. The importance of food web indicators is reflected in their utilization as descriptor to achieve Good Environmental Status for marine environments under the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive(MSFD).This PhD project addresses a major and persistent gap in our knowledge of ecological communities, as half of the world's species -parasites -are routinely ignored in food web analyses for practical and conceptual reasons.

Parasites have only even been considered in the food web literature for the past 20-years. Given the ubiquity of parasite links they remain very under-represented. A simple search on Web of Science for 'food web' yields 35.965 publications, adding 'parasite' to the search reduces publication numbers to only 799.By addressing this gap of knowledge, the PhD student has a great opportunity here to influence the field of food web and ecosystem research, both in a conceptual (inclusion of parasites) and practical way (planned pilot study on possible eDNA approaches).

Food webs are integrative concepts that cross-arbitrary boundaries between species and ecosystems. Climate change as well as other anthropogenic stressors have been shown to cause effects such as species range expansion/movement and can only be understood and predicted if ecosystems can be described quantitatively in their full complexity. An established novel method of including parasites in food webs and proof of its effectiveness will provide a translational concept approach that could be applied to any ecosystem present between catchment and coast.