The Role of Body Size in Multispecies Systems

Andre Belgrano is currently at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Aquatic Resources, Institute of Marine Research, Lysekil, and at the Swedish Institute for the Marine Environment (SIME), Gothenburg, in Sweden. He has held faculty positions in the United States at the University of Maryland, University of New Mexico, University of Washington, and was a visiting scientist at the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), Santa Fe, New Mexico.Dr Belgrano is broadly interested in ecological and evolutionary studies that use ecosystem status and trend data, for characterising relationships between diversity patterns and ecosystem functioning, which includes the effect of commercial fisheries, climate change and environmental variability. His research approach is to use the broad concepts of macroecology, food webs theory and evolution to understand the underlying common rules governing ecosystem dynamics and functioning. Most of Dr Belgrano’s current work focuses on functional biodiversity, ecosystem-based management for marine fisheries, ocean health, governance, sustainability and resilience in aquatic systems.

"Important and innovative contributions to the subject and together have a breadth of approach that means that what they choose to put before their readers is likely to be of unusual interest or significance." --Plant Pathology

• Analytic predictions of structure and dynamics of community size spectra using a species-resolved modelAxel G. Rossberg"The size-structure of ecological communities: species- and size-class-based approaches"Bo EbenmanThe Weddell Sea food web Ute JacobEvolutionary dynamics of body size in food websCarlos MelianSize-based community indicators: are there generalised patterns of human impacts in marine, freshwater and terrestrial systems?Katie LongoThe generality of size-based methods for measuring human impacts on ecosystemsFrank Van VeenDeterminants of density- body size scaling within food webs and tools for their detectionMatias ArimVariation of body size and its relations to mortality estimates at intra- and inter-species levelKondoh MichioCommentary and OverviewRichard Law