NERC-FAPESP: New approaches to bridging individual-level foraging variation and ecological network structure in the Anthropocene

Trophic interactions, the consumption of one organism by another, move matter and energy through natural systems, influencing everything from individual organism health to how ecosystems function. Therefore, finding general patterns in foraging decisions is paramount to understanding and, ultimately, preserving and restoring natural habitats and the services they provide. Ecologists have long investigated trophic relationships at the community scale, uncovering trophic niche variation between species. However, since foraging decisions operate at the scale of individuals, there has recently been a growing interest in understanding trophic variation both within and between individuals. Surprisingly, there is relatively little synergy between community-level and individual-level research, and the current examples exclude recent advances across both sub-fields. While this is important from a conceptual perspective, it is also relevant in an applied context as food webs across the globe are constantly being rearranged in our rapidly changing world. Given that these food webs are changing before we even understand their structure and functioning, our ability to mitigate these impacts and restore their biodiversity and services is severely limited, demanding new research approaches and creative collaborations. Recent technological developments have revolutionised our ability to measure the use of food resources by organisms in ecological systems with unprecedented accuracy, presenting new opportunities to bridge individual and community-level approaches. In particular, advances in molecular, isotopic, and nutritional analyses have increased the resolution of resource use data, and novel analytical approaches have expanded our ability to study the mechanisms driving interactions; however, we are still far from exploring the full potential of these new tools to understand niche variation across levels of biological organisation. More important than integrating these methodological advances is developing a framework that can address real-world problems by determining how individual foraging shapes whole ecosystems affected by human activity globally. This collaborative project aims to develop a novel individual-to-community integrative framework for analysing foraging data across these scales by implementing conceptual, methodological and applied approaches. To achieve this, the project will combine digital and in-person workshops alongside empirical pilot studies to exchange and build capacity across continents, fostering the development of a novel analytical framework based on existing and newly generated data from both tropical and temperate ecosystems. Pilot studies will provide a real-world opportunity to refine the novel framework in two contrasting systems: populations of an invasive generalist snail in the tropics and arthropod communities under the influence of light pollution in a temperate agricultural landscape. Together, these activities will realise and demonstrate the full potential of bridging foraging research across levels of biological organisation and ecological contexts. By combining diverse expertise and worldviews, we aim to develop innovative ideas and pathways to apply an individual-to-community framework to larger projects and systems. The project will initiate a partnership between Dr Jordan Cuff and Dr Raul Costa-Pereira, bridging the Foraging Ecology Research Group at Newcastle University, UK and the Intraspecific Diversity Lab at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, with workshops throughout to widen participation further. This collaboration, fostered by shared academic interests and principles as early career scientists, has immense potential for significantly advancing our ability to study foraging across a range of scales, and elucidating the drivers and consequences of biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene.