SynthesisOecologia2015
Meta-analysis of amino acid stable nitrogen isotope ratios for estimating trophic position in marine organisms.
Synthesis in Oecologia, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 210 citations in OpenAlex.
- Advancing Amino Acid Isotope-Inferred Trophic Ecology in an Apex Predator: Insights From a Data-Rich Killer Whale Population.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Repeated migration informs amino acid nitrogen isotope incorporation in the African elephant Loxodonta africana.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Investigating human paleodiet at Mesolithic Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, Karelia using a multi-proxy stable isotope approach.PloS one · 2026Article
- Article
- Ecological Niche Changes of Two Sympatric Species (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Diet Reconstruction Under Limited Prior Information: Dietary Contributions and Isotopic Niche ofBiology · 2025Article
- Trophic dynamics and metabolic pathways in host parasite interactions revealed by nitrogen isotope analysis of amino acids in multiple tissues.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Beyond emissions: unravelling the effects of ecosystem change on contaminant concentrations in herring from the Baltic Sea.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2025Article
- Investigating long-term trophic stability in North Atlantic cod (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Ecological Factors Decouple Great Lakes Fish Mercury Concentrations Trends from Decadal Declines in Atmospheric Mercury.Environmental science & technology · 2025Article
- Dietary Flexibility of Calanoid Copepods in the Sub-Arctic Atlantic: The Role of Protistan Microzooplankton.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- High-resolution isotope dietary analysis of Mesolithic and Neolithic humans from Franchthi Cave, Greece.PloS one · 2025Article
- Challenging trophic position assessments in complex ecosystems: Calculation method, choice of baseline, trophic enrichment factors, season and feeding guild do matter: A case study from Marquesas Islands coral reefs.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Body size predicts ontogenetic nitrogen stable-isotope (δScientific reports · 2024Article
- Comparison of δScientific reports · 2024Article
- Trophic lengthening triggered by filamentous, NEcology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- Anchovy boom and bust linked to trophic shifts in larval diet.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Reconstructing herbivore diets: a multivariate statistical approach to interpreting amino acid nitrogen isotope values.Oecologia · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Estimating trophic structures is a common approach used to retrieve information regarding energy pathways, predation, and competition in complex ecosystems. The application of amino acid (AA) compound-specific nitrogen (N) isotope analysis (CSIA) is a relatively new method used to estimate trophic position (TP) and feeding relationships in diverse organisms. Here, we conducted the first meta-analysis of δ(15)N AA values from measurements of 359 marine species covering four trophic levels, and compared TP estimates from AA-CSIA to literature values derived from food items, gut or stomach content analysis. We tested whether the AA trophic enrichment factor (TEF), or the (15)N enrichment among different individual AAs is constant across trophic levels and whether inclusion of δ(15)N values from multiple AAs improves TP estimation. For the TEF of glutamic acid relative to phenylalanine (Phe) we found an average value of 6.6‰ across all taxa, which is significantly lower than the commonly applied 7.6‰. We found that organism feeding ecology influences TEF values of several trophic AAs relative to Phe, with significantly higher TEF values for herbivores compared to omnivores and carnivores, while TEF values were also significantly lower for animals excreting urea compared to ammonium. Based on the comparison of multiple model structures using the metadata of δ(15)N AA values we show that increasing the number of AAs in principle improves precision in TP estimation. This meta-analysis clarifies the advantages and limitations of using individual δ(15)N AA values as tools in trophic ecology and provides a guideline for the future application of AA-CSIA to food web studies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.