Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in food webs: the vertical diversity hypothesis

One challenge in merging community and ecosystem ecology is to integrate the complexity of natural multitrophic communities into concepts of ecosystem functioning. Here, we combine food-web and allometry theories to demonstrate that primary production, as measured by the total nutrient uptake of the multitrophic community, is determined by vertical diversity (i.e. food web's maximum trophic level) and structure (i.e. distributions of species and...