Biotic Interactions and Trophic Structure
Cross-boundary subsidies have important impacts on species interactions and food web dynamics. Subsidies of materials and organisms can affect all trophic, or feeding, levels of food webs either directly or indirectly. Inputs of nutrient and detritus from another patch generally increase the population growth of the resident producers (plants) and detritivores (Polis et al. 1997). Increased growth at the producer level can result in a bottom-up trophic effect, in which increases in populations at lower trophic levels support a higher population of consumers than would otherwise be possible in a closed system (Polis et al. 1997). allochthonous detrital inputs can also have strong impacts on food web dynamics over a variety of temporal scales, ranging from seconds to millennia, as in the case of fossil fuel formation from build-up of detritus over millennia (Moore et al. 2004).
Read more about this topic: Cross-boundary Subsidy, Relation of Cross-boundary Subsidies To Selected Ecological Concepts
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