Common species vital for stability of food webs, study shows

The loss of common flora and fauna species can make food webs unstable, with big consequences for entire ecosystems, a Swiss study has shown. An international team led by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) and the federal technology institute ETH Zurich modelled the effects of various extinction scenarios on regional food webs in Switzerland for the first time. +Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox To do this, the researchers created a complex network with over 280,000 feeding relationships between around 7,800 species of plants, vertebrates and invertebrates. The researchers then simulated the loss of species from various habitat types. The study, which was published in the Communications Biology journal, showed that regional food webs collapse quite quickly when common species in key habitats like wetlands or agricultural land are lost. This means, among other things, that ecosystem services such as pollination are no ...