van Bodegom Peter M.

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van Bodegom
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Peter M.
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Partitioning the impact of environmental drivers and species interactions in dynamic aquatic communities

2019-11-12 , Musters, C. J. M. , Ieromina, Oleksandra , Barmentlo, S. Henrik , Hunting, Ellard R. , Schrama, Maarten , Cieraad, Ellen , Vijver, Martina G. , van Bodegom, Peter M.

Temperate aquatic communities are highly diverse and seasonally variable, due to internal biotic processes and environmental drivers, including human‐induced stressors. The impact of drivers on species abundance is supposed to differ fundamentally depending on whether populations are experiencing limitations, which may shift over the season. However, an integrated understanding of how drivers structure communities seasonally is currently lacking. In order to partition the effect of drivers, we used random forests to quantify interactions between all taxa and environmental factors using macrofaunal data from 18 agricultural ditches sampled over two years. We found that, over the agricultural season, taxon abundance became increasingly better predicted by the abundances of co‐occurring taxa and nutrients compared to other abiotic factors, including pesticides. Our approach provides fundamental insights in community dynamics and highlights the need to consider changes in species interactions to understand the effects of anthropogenic stressors.

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Eutrophication governs predator-prey interactions and temperature effects in Aedes aegypti populations.

2019-04-24 , Krol, Louie , Gorsich, Erin E. , Hunting, Ellard R. , Govender, Danny , van Bodegom, Peter M. , Schrama, Maarten

Background Mosquito population dynamics are driven by large-scale (e.g. climatological) and small-scale (e.g. ecological) factors. While these factors are known to independently influence mosquito populations, it remains uncertain how drivers that simultaneously operate under natural conditions interact to influence mosquito populations. We, therefore, developed a well-controlled outdoor experiment to assess the interactive effects of two ecological drivers, predation and nutrient availability, on mosquito life history traits under multiple temperature regimes. Methods We conducted a temperature-controlled mesocosm experiment in Kruger National Park, South Africa, with the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti. We investigated how larval survival, emergence and development rates were impacted by the presence of a locally-common invertebrate predator (backswimmers Anisops varia Fieber (Notonectidae: Hemiptera), nutrient availability (oligotrophic vs eutrophic, reflecting field conditions), water temperature, and interactions between each driver. Results We observed that the effects of predation and temperature both depended on eutrophication. Predation caused lower adult emergence in oligotrophic conditions but higher emergence under eutrophic conditions. Higher temperatures caused faster larval development rates in eutrophic but not oligotrophic conditions. Conclusions Our study shows that ecological bottom-up and top-down drivers strongly and interactively govern mosquito life history traits for Ae. aegypti populations. Specifically, we show that eutrophication can inversely affect predator–prey interactions and mediate the effect of temperature on mosquito survival and development rates. Hence, our results suggest that nutrient pollution can overrule biological constraints on natural mosquito populations and highlights the importance of studying multiple factors.

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Atmospheric electricity influencing biogeochemical processes in soils and sediments

2019-04-16 , Hunting, Ellard R. , Harrison, R. Giles , Bruder, Andreas , van Bodegom, Peter M. , van der Geest, Harm G. , Kampfraath, Andries A. , Vorenhout, Michel , Admiraal, Wim , Cusell, Casper , Gessner, Mark O.

The Earth’s subsurface represents a complex electrochemical environment that contains many electro-active chemical compounds that are relevant for a wide array of biologically driven ecosystem processes. Concentrations of many of these electro-active compounds within Earth’s subsurface environments fluctuate during the day and over seasons. This has been observed for surface waters, sediments and continental soils. This variability can affect particularly small, relatively immobile organisms living in these environments. While various drivers have been identified, a comprehensive understanding of the causes and consequences of spatio-temporal variability in subsurface electrochemistry is still lacking. Here we propose that variations in atmospheric electricity (AE) can influence the electrochemical environments of soils, water bodies and their sediments, with implications that are likely relevant for a wide range of organisms and ecosystem processes. We tested this hypothesis in field and laboratory case studies. Based on measurements of subsurface redox conditions in soils and sediment, we found evidence for both local and global variation in AE with corresponding patterns in subsurface redox conditions. In the laboratory, bacterial respiratory responses, electron transport activity and H2S production were observed to be causally linked to changes in atmospheric cation concentrations. We argue that such patterns are part of an overlooked phenomenon. This recognition widens our conceptual understanding of chemical and biological processes in the Earth’s subsurface and their interactions with the atmosphere and the physical environment.

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