Detailed Food Web Networks of Three Greater Antillean Coral Reef Systems: The Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica

Food webs represent one of the most complex aspects of community biotic interactions. Complex food webs are represented as networks of interspecific interactions, where nodes represent species or groups of species, and links are predator-prey interactions. This paper presents reconstructions of coral reef food webs in three Greater Antillean regions of the Caribbean: the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica. Though not taxonomically comprehensive, each food web nevertheless comprises producers and consumers, single-celled and multicellular organisms, and species foraging on reefs and adjacent seagrass beds. Species are grouped into trophic guilds if their prey and predator links are indistinguishable. The data list guilds, taxonomic composition, prey guilds/species, and predators. Primary producer and invertebrate richness are regionally uniform, but vertebrate richness varies on the basis of more detailed occurrence data. Each region comprises 169 primary producers, 513 protistan and invertebrate consumer species, and 159, 178, and 170 vertebrate species in the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica, respectively. Caribbean coral reefs are among the world's most endangered by anthropogenic activities. The datasets presented here will facilitate comparisons of historical and regional variation, the assessment of impacts of species loss and invasion, and the application of food webs to ecosystem analyses.

Long-Term Data from Fields Recovering after Sugarcane, Banana, and Pasture Cultivation in Ecuador

I report here on an ongoing permanent plot study in areas recovering from agriculture in Ecuador. These plots were set up in 1995 at Maquipucuna Reserve where the forest is tropical lower montane. The study consists of replicate fields in three past crop types (Sugarcane, Banana, and Pasture) for a total of six fields. Each field was first divided into 25 continuous 2 m × 5 m subplots which together form a 10 m × 25 m plot with the longest side bordering the adjacent forest. Then starting in 1996, and continuing annually every year since, each subplot has been sampled for percent cover of all plants and diameter at breast height (dbh) for all trees whose dbh is greater than or equal to 1 cm. I have used that data in these published studies: (1) species composition and life form, richness, and basal area trends, (2) computation of all positive and negative pairwise species associations, (3) relationships between richness and productivity over time, (4) dominance-diversity curves, and (5) definition and quantification of old field plant communities. Finally with the help of the LTER program in Puerto Rico, this sampling continues, with 2012 marking the sixteenth year of continuous annual sampling.