Despite intensive research on species dissimilarity patterns across communities (i.e. β‐diversity), we still know little about their implications for variation in food‐web structures. Our analyses of 50 lake and 48 forest soil communities show that, while species dissimilarity depends on environmental and spatial gradients, these effects are only weakly propagated to the networks. Moreover, our results show that species and fo...

Forest soil and litter is inhabited by a diverse community of animals, which directly and indirectly rely on dead organic matter as habitat and food resource. However, community composition may be driven by biotic or abiotic forces, and these vary with changes in habitat structure and resource supply associated with forest land use. To evaluate these changes, we compiled comprehensive data on the species composition of soil an...

While metabolic theory predicts variance in population density within communities depending on population average body masses, the ecological stoichiometry concept relates density variation across communities to varying resource stoichiometry. Using a data set including biomass densities of 4959 populations of soil invertebrates across 48 forest sites we combined these two frameworks. We analyzed how the scaling of biomass den...

Ecological communities consist of small abundant and large non‐abundant species. The energetic equivalence rule is an often‐observed pattern that could be explained by equal energy usage among abundant small organisms and non‐abundant large organisms. To generate this pattern, metabolism (as an indicator of individual energy use) and abundance have to scale inversely with body mass, and cancel each other out. In contrast, the...

The stability of ecological communities depends strongly on quantitative characteristics of population interactions (type‐II vs. type‐III functional responses) and the distribution of body masses across species. Until now, these two aspects have almost exclusively been treated separately leaving a substantial gap in our general understanding of food webs. We analysed a large data set of arthropod feeding rates and found that a...