Modeling under the framework of ecological stoichiometric allows the investigation of the effects of food quality on food web population dynamics. Recent discoveries in ecological stoichiometry suggest that grazer dynamics are affected by insufficient food nutrient content (low phosphorus (P)/carbon (C) ratio) as well as excess food nutrient content (high P:C). This phenomenon is known as the "...

Interactions between different axes of an organism's niche determine the evolutionary trajectory of a population. An extreme case of these interactions is predicted from ecological theory in Liebig's law of the minimum. This law states that in environments where multiple nutrients are in relatively low concentrations, only one nutrient will affect the growth of the organism. This implies that t...

Nutrient availability is a critical controller of plant species composition and productivity and is influenced by the interaction of a number of biotic and abiotic factors (Chapin et al. 2002). In this chapter, we explore the controls over nutrient pools and fluxes across different California grassland types. We will begin with an in-depth discussion of the exoticdominated annual grassland type...

Ecological stoichiometry studies the balance of energy and multiple chemical elements in ecological interactions to establish how the nutrient content affect food-web dynamics and nutrient cycling in ecosystems. In this study, we formulate a food chain with two limiting nutrients in the form of a stoichiometric population model. A comprehensive global analysis of the rich dynamics of the target...

In Nature microbial populations are subject to fluctuating nutrient levels. Nutrient abundance fluctuations are important for evolutionary and ecological dynamics in microbial communities since they impact growth rates, population sizes and microbial physiology. Here we use automated continuous-culture devices and single-cell imaging to show that when populations of Escherichia coli are subject...

Responses of detrital pathways to nutrients may differ fundamentally from pathways involving living plants: basal carbon resources can potentially decrease rather than increase with nutrient enrichment. Despite the potential for nutrients to accelerate heterotrophic processes and fluxes of detritus, few studies have examined detritus-nutrient dynamics at whole-ecosystem scales. We quantified or...