Does climate determine the trophic organization of communities around the world? A recent study showed that a limited number of community trophic structures emerge when co-occurrence of trophic guilds among large mammals is examined globally. We ask whether the pattern is general across all terrestrial mammals (n = 5272) and birds (n = 9993). We found that the six community-trophic structures previously identified with large mammals are largely maintained when all mammals and birds are examined, both together and separately, and that bioclimatic variables, including net primary productivity (NPP), are strongly related to variation in the geographical boundaries of community trophic structures. We argue that results are consistent with the view that trophic communities are self-organized structures optimizing energy flows, and that climate likely acts as the main control parameter by modulating the amount of solar energy available for conversion by plants and percolated through food webs across trophic communities. Gradual changes in climate parameters would thus be expected to trigger abrupt changes in energy flows resulting from phase transitions (tipping points) between different dynamical stable states. We expect future research to examine if our results are general across organisms, ecosystems, scales and methodologies, and whether inferences rooted in complex systems theory are supported. The emergence of general patterns in the functional properties of animal communities at broad scales supports the emergence of food-web biogeography as a sub-discipline of biogeography focused on the analysis of the geographical distributions of trophic relationships among organisms.

中文翻译：

---

鸟类和哺乳动物营养结构的生物地理学

气候是否决定了世界各地社区的营养组织？最近的一项研究表明，在全球范围内检查大型哺乳动物中的营养行会同时出现时，会出现数量有限的群落营养结构。我们询问这种模式是否在所有陆地哺乳动物（n = 5272）和鸟类（n = 9993）中都是普遍的。我们发现，当所有哺乳动物和鸟类一起或分开进行检查时，先前与大型哺乳动物确定的六种群落营养结构在很大程度上得以维持，并且包括净初级生产力 (NPP) 在内的生物气候变量与群落营养结构的地理边界。我们认为结果与营养群落是优化能量流的自组织结构的观点一致，并且气候可能通过调节可用于植物转化并通过营养群落的食物网渗透的太阳能量来充当主要控制参数。因此，预计气候参数的逐渐变化会引发由不同动态稳定状态之间的相变（临界点）引起的能量流的突然变化。我们希望未来的研究能够检验我们的结果是否普遍适用于生物体、生态系统、规模和方法，以及植根于复杂系统理论的推论是否得到支持。