Trophic Specialisation Levels of Geese, Lemmings, and Ruminants with Regard to the Transformation of Arctic Herbivore Communities

Despite the availability of more and more data on Arctic biotic communities, even the principal course of their transformation remains unclear. Differences in the population dynamics of geese, lemmings, and ruminants covering more than 98% of the Arctic terrestrial ecosystem recycling and competing...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inContemporary problems of ecology Vol. 16; no. 6; pp. 734 - 744
Main Author Sheremetev, I. S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Moscow Pleiades Publishing 01.12.2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Aquatic birds
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Climate change
Ecology
Environmental factors
Food selection
Global warming
Growth rate
Herbivores
Life Sciences
Population dynamics
Populations
Specialization
Transformations
Waterfowl
Arctic region
selectivity
geese
global change
ruminants
specialization
Arctic
lemmings
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Summary:Despite the availability of more and more data on Arctic biotic communities, even the principal course of their transformation remains unclear. Differences in the population dynamics of geese, lemmings, and ruminants covering more than 98% of the Arctic terrestrial ecosystem recycling and competing for common trophic resources on the basis of specialization are of great interest. Comparing 15 species of the taxa, we showed that grades of their morphophysiological adaptation to phytophagy are matched to empirical estimates of their food selectivity, thereby describing their trophic specialization distribution. Thus, in the Arctic herbivore communities, the selectivity distribution is just as stable as specialization. Populations of trophic specialists in these communities, the most glaring examples of which are the muskox and the snow goose, generally exceed in size and/or growth rate the populations of generalists, which include lemmings and the smallest black geese. The specialist populations have mainly higher size and/or growth rate than the generalist populations. It may be concluded that interspecific competition influences the contemporary transformation of the Arctic herbivore communities much more strongly than environmental factors such as global warming and human activity do.
ISSN:1995-4255
1995-4263
DOI:10.1134/S1995425523060185