Food web rewiring drives long-term compositional differences and late-disturbance interactions at the community level.

Ecological communities are constantly exposed to multiple natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Multivariate composition (if recovered) has been found to need significantly more time to be regained after pulsed disturbance compared to univariate diversity metrics and functional endpoints. However, the mechanisms driving the different recovery times of communities to single and multiple disturbances remain unexplored.

Marine food webs are more complex but less stable in sub-Antarctic (Beagle Channel, Argentina) than in Antarctic (Potter Cove, Antarctic Peninsula) regions.

Food web structure plays an important role in determining ecosystem stability against perturbations. High-latitude marine ecosystems are being affected by environmental stressors and biological invasions. In the West Antarctic Peninsula these transformations are mainly driven by climate change, while in the sub-Antarctic region by anthropogenic activities.

Ecological network assembly: How the regional metaweb influences local food webs.

Local food webs result from a sequence of colonisations and extinctions by species from the regional pool or metaweb, that is, the assembly process. Assembly is theorised to be a selective process: whether or not certain species or network structures can persist is partly determined by local processes including habitat filtering and dynamical constraints. Consequently, local food web structure should reflect these processes.

Effects of macroalgae loss in an Antarctic marine food web: applying extinction thresholds to food web studies.

Antarctica is seriously affected by climate change, particularly at the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) where a rapid regional warming is observed. Potter Cove is a WAP fjord at Shetland Islands that constitutes a biodiversity hotspot where over the last years, Potter Cove annual air temperatures averages increased by 0.66 °C, coastal glaciers declined, and suspended particulate matter increased due to ice melting.

Architecture of marine food webs: To be or not be a 'small-world'.

The search for general properties in network structure has been a central issue for food web studies in recent years. One such property is the small-world topology that combines a high clustering and a small distance between nodes of the network. This property may increase food web resilience but make them more sensitive to the extinction of connected species.