ArticleScience advances2020
Outsized effect of predation: Wolves alter wetland creation and recolonization by killing ecosystem engineers.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Maximizing the potential benefits of beaver restoration for fire resilience and water storage.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- Can Wolf Predation Immediately Alter the Foraging Behavior of Beavers?: Video of a Wolf Killing a Foraging Beaver.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Season, prey availability, sex, and age explain prey size selection in a large solitary carnivore.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Wolves alter the trajectory of forests by shaping the central place foraging behaviour of an ecosystem engineer.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Differential provisioning roles, prey size, and prey abundance shape the dynamic feeding behavior of gray wolves.Communications biology · 2023Article
- The diversity of animals identified as keystone species.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- The ethology of wolves foraging on freshwater fish in a boreal ecosystem.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Temporal variation in translocated Isle Royale wolf diet.Ecology and evolution · 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
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Gray wolves are a premier example of how predators can transform ecosystems through trophic cascades. However, whether wolves change ecosystems as drastically as previously suggested has been increasingly questioned. We demonstrate how wolves alter wetland creation and recolonization by killing dispersing beavers. Beavers are ecosystem engineers that generate most wetland creation throughout boreal ecosystems. By studying beaver pond creation and recolonization patterns coupled with wolf predation on beavers, we determined that 84% of newly created and recolonized beaver ponds remained occupied until the fall, whereas 0% of newly created and recolonized ponds remained active after a wolf killed the dispersing beaver that colonized that pond. By affecting where and when beavers engineer ecosystems, wolves alter all of the ecological processes (e.g., water storage, nutrient cycling, and forest succession) that occur due to beaver-created impoundments. Our study demonstrates how predators have an outsized effect on ecosystems when they kill ecosystem engineers.
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.