ArticleNature communications2019
Climate shapes mammal community trophic structures and humans simplify them.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in free-ranging wild mammals.BMC veterinary research · 2025Pooled it
- Biotic interactions biogeography: A framework for understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity patterns across scales.PLoS biology · 2026Review
- Food Web Similarity Increases With Productivity Similarity at a Continental Scale.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Global evidence of non-pyramidal and uniform ratios of animal diversity across terrestrial trophic levels.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Mixed effects of protected areas on avian food webs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Trophic convergence of marine vertebrate communities worldwide.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web connectance of tropical forest mammals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Human disturbances affect the topology of food webs.Ecology letters · 2022Article
- Ecological network complexity scales with area.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Effects of climate variation on bird escape distances modulate community responses to global change.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Nature's complexity is intriguing, but the circumstances determining whether or how order emerges from such complexity remains a matter of extensive research. Using the geographical distributions and food preferences of all terrestrial mammal species with masses >3 kg, we show that large mammals group into feeding guilds (species exploiting similar resources) and that these guilds form trophic structures that vary across biomes globally. We identify five trophic structures closely matching climate variability and named them boreal, temperate, semiarid, seasonal tropical and humid tropical owing to their relative overlap with the distribution of biomes. We also find that human activities simplify trophic structures, generally transitioning them to species-poorer states. Detected transitions include boreal and temperate structures becoming depauperate or seasonal- and humid-tropical becoming semiarid. Whether the observed generalities among trophic structures of large mammals are indicative of patterns across whole food webs is matter for further investigation. The results help refine projections of the effects of environmental change on the trophic structure of large mammals.
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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.