Study
Patterns in the fate of production in plant communities
Cebrian, Just
The American Naturalist, 1999
Compiles published measurements of plant production and its fate across terrestrial and aquatic communities — forests, grasslands, marshes, seagrass beds, macroalgal stands and phytoplankton — and compares the proportion consumed by herbivores against the proportion entering the detrital pathway or being stored.
- Studied in
- Plantae
- Sample size
- compiled production and consumption budgets across ecosystem types
The share of plant production eaten alive varies enormously between ecosystem types, from a small minority in forests to a large majority in phytoplankton systems. In most terrestrial communities the great majority of production is not consumed by herbivores; it dies and enters detritus.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
The fate of primary production is systematically related to plant tissue quality and turnover, and grazing accounts for a minority of it in structurally complex, slow-turnover vegetation.
How NatureHQ reads it
The measurement that justifies calling the detrital pathway the hidden half. Every popular food chain runs plant to herbivore to predator, and in a forest that pathway handles a small fraction of what the plants actually make. The rest falls, dies and is dismantled — and the organisms doing it are almost entirely absent from the diagram. Worth noting that the ratio is not universal: in phytoplankton systems most production genuinely is grazed, which is why "detritus dominates" is a statement about forests rather than about life.
- A compilation of studies using different methods, and production budgets are difficult to measure consistently.
- Ecosystem categories are coarse, and within-type variation is large.
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