title: The use of DNA barcodes in food web construction-terrestrial and aquatic ecologists unite!
abstract: By depicting who eats whom, food webs offer descriptions of how groupings in nature (typically species or populations) are linked to each other. For asking questions on how food webs are built and work, we need descriptions of food webs at different levels of resolution. DNA techniques provide opportunities for highly resolved webs. In this paper, we offer an exposé of how DNA-based techniques, and DNA barcodes in particular, have recently been used to construct food web structure in both terrestrial and aquatic systems. We highlight how such techniques can be applied to simultaneously improve the taxonomic resolution of the nodes of the web (i.e., the species), and the links between them (i.e., who eats whom). We end by proposing how DNA barcodes and DNA information may allow new approaches to the construction of larger interaction webs, and overcome some hurdles to achieving adequate sample size. Most importantly, we propose that the joint adoption and development of these techniques may serve to unite approaches to food web studies in aquatic and terrestrial systems-revealing the extent to which food webs in these environments are structured similarly to or differently from each other, and how they are linked by dispersal.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7044, 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden.|b Spatial Foodweb Ecology Group, Department of Agricultural Sciences, PO Box 27, (Latokartanonkaari 5), FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Tomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Roslin
authors.affiliation: c Centre for Ecology and Evolution in Microbial model Systems (EEMiS), Department of Biology and Environmental Science, Linnaeus University, 39182 Kalmar, Sweden.
authors.forename: Sanna
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Majaneva
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D058893:DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic / Q000379:methods; D017753:Ecosystem; D020387:Food Chain; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans
keywords: DNA barcodes; codes à barres de l’ADN; ecological networks; food webs; identification des espèces; liens trophiques; réseaux trophiques; réseaux écologiques; species delimitation; species identification; trophic links