Herbivore diet selectivity and its influence over ecosystem recycling in Wrangel Island
I. S. Sheremetyev1, S. B. Rozenfeld2, V. V. Baranyuk3
1Federal Scientific Center of the East Asia Terrestrial Biodiversity of FEB RAS, Vladivostok, Russia
2Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of RAS, Moscow, Russia
3All-Russia Research Institute for Nature Conservation (ARRINP), Moscow, Russia
Keywords: Arctic, competition, gee
Abstract
Under human increasing activity in Arctic areas and in the face of global climate change the study of Arctic communities and ecosystems becomes more and more interesting. However the question of interspecific interactions’ impact in their transformation remains unresolved. The paper deals with a diet selectivity analysis of Wrangel Island lemming, goose and ruminant species, an estimation of the selectivity influence on their long-term community dynamics and the whole tundra ecosystem functioning. It was shown that the herbivore selectivity distribution mainly depends on their morphophisiology and that under equal conditions the lesser selective feeders become dominant with biodiversity increasing. We concluded that despite considerable human impact on the herbivore species composition their mainly endogenous dynamics of abundance distribution correspond to the ecological succession, in which the total herbivore biomass decreased by half, and their total consumption and likely the whole primary production into more than four times.
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