ArticleEcology and evolution2015
Distance measures and optimization spaces in quantitative fatty acid signature analysis.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- The importance of method selection when estimating diet composition with quantitative fatty acid signature analysis.PloS one · 2025Article
- Measuring repeatability of compositional diet estimates: An example using quantitative fatty acid signature analysis.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Article
- Fatty acid profiles of feeding and fasting bears: estimating calibration coefficients, the timeframe of diet estimates, and selective mobilization during hibernation.Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · 2022Article
- Complementary use of stable isotopes and fatty acids for quantitative diet estimation of sympatric predators, the Antarctic pack-ice seals.Oecologia · 2021Article
- Evaluating the performance of the Bayesian mixing tool MixSIAR with fatty acid data for quantitative estimation of diet.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Comparison of Bayesian and numerical optimization-based diet estimation on herbivorous zooplankton.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Unlocking the power of fatty acids as dietary tracers and metabolic signals in fishes and aquatic invertebrates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The critical importance of experimentation in biomarker-based trophic ecology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Dietary fat concentrations influence fatty acid assimilation patterns in Atlantic pollock (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Juvenile Dungeness crabs (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Article
- Large-scale molecular diet analysis in a generalist marine mammal reveals male preference for prey of conservation concern.Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Article
- Simultaneous estimation of diet composition and calibration coefficients with fatty acid signature data.Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis has become an important method of diet estimation in ecology, especially marine ecology. Controlled feeding trials to validate the method and estimate the calibration coefficients necessary to account for differential metabolism of individual fatty acids have been conducted with several species from diverse taxa. However, research into potential refinements of the estimation method has been limited. We compared the performance of the original method of estimating diet composition with that of five variants based on different combinations of distance measures and calibration-coefficient transformations between prey and predator fatty acid signature spaces. Fatty acid signatures of pseudopredators were constructed using known diet mixtures of two prey data sets previously used to estimate the diets of polar bears Ursus maritimus and gray seals Halichoerus grypus, and their diets were then estimated using all six variants. In addition, previously published diets of Chukchi Sea polar bears were re-estimated using all six methods. Our findings reveal that the selection of an estimation method can meaningfully influence estimates of diet composition. Among the pseudopredator results, which allowed evaluation of bias and precision, differences in estimator performance were rarely large, and no one estimator was universally preferred, although estimators based on the Aitchison distance measure tended to have modestly superior properties compared to estimators based on the Kullback-Leibler distance measure. However, greater differences were observed among estimated polar bear diets, most likely due to differential estimator sensitivity to assumption violations. Our results, particularly the polar bear example, suggest that additional research into estimator performance and model diagnostics is warranted.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.