ReviewEcology and evolution2016
The temporal scale of diet and dietary proxies.
Review in Ecology and evolution, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Quantification of molar sub-regions suggests increasing herbivory during primate origins.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Machine learning approaches to dietary classification from dental microtexture in primates.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Diet-Driven Divergence in Gut Microbiota Variation Between Two Sympatric Gerbil Species.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Stable Isotope Analysis Reveals Habitat-Driven Dietary Niches ofAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Unraveling Omnivory and Community Interactions Between Primary Producers and an Apex Predator.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Gut Microecology of Four Sympatric Desert Rodents Varies by Diet.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Characterizing the trophic ecology of herbivorous coral reef fishes using stable isotope and fatty acid biomarkers.PloS one · 2025Article
- Gastrointestinal morphology is an effective functional dietary proxy that predicts small mammal community structure.Ecology · 2024Article
- Tibetan red deer (PeerJ · 2024Article
- Using salamanders as model taxa to understand vertebrate feeding constraints during the late Devonian water-to-land transition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Inferences to estimate consumer's diet using stable isotopes: Insights from a dynamic mixing model.PloS one · 2022Article
- Dental wear proxy correlation in a long-term feeding experiment on sheep (Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Dental microwear texture analysis as a tool for dietary discrimination in elasmobranchs.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Functional traits of the world's late Quaternary large-bodied avian and mammalian herbivores.Scientific data · 2021Article
- Homogenization of carnivorous mammal ensembles caused by global range reductions of large-bodied hypercarnivores during the late Quaternary.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Pterosaurs ate soft-bodied cephalopods (Coleoidea).Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Chewing, dental morphology and wear in tapirs (Tapirus spp.) and a comparison of free-ranging and captive specimens.PloS one · 2020Article
- Dietary differences in archosaur and lepidosaur reptiles revealed by dental microwear textural analysis.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Pterosaur dietary hypotheses: a review of ideas and approaches.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Diets estimated from different proxies such as stable isotopes, stomach contents, and dental microwear often disagree, leading to nominally well-supported but greatly differing estimates of diet for both extinct and extant species that complicate our understanding of ecology. We show that these perceived incongruences can be caused by proxies recording diet over vastly different timescales. Field observations reveal a diet averaged over minutes or hours, whereas dental morphology may reflect the diet of a lineage over millions of years of evolution. Failing to explicitly consider the scale of proxies and the potentially large temporal variability in diet can cause erroneous predictions in any downstream analyses such as conservation planning or paleohabitat reconstructions. We propose a cross-scale framework for conceptualizing diet suitable for both modern ecologists and paleontologists and provide recommendations for any studies involving dietary data. Treating diet in this temporally explicit framework and matching the scale of our questions with the scale of our data will lead to a much richer and clearer understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes.
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