ISOWEB ‐ Analysing temporal and spatial changes in wood decomposer food webs using novel stable isotope techniques

Land use is known to largely affect trophic interactions and related ecosystem processes such as wood decomposition. How decomposer food webs change along temporal and spatial scales is, however, largely unknown. Traditional and novel stable isotope techniques are promising in shedding light in food web dynamics, but applications rigorously testing the opportunities and limitations of these methods based on well-designed experiments are still lacking. We aim at making use of samples from a large-scale experiment to test whether novel compound-specific amino acid ΔN isotope analyses allow for the determination of the exact tropic position of beetles and resulting food webs without using isotope signatures of food sources. The successful development of the methods will open new avenues and proposals for addressing novel questions to data of other projects conducted at the WSL, value the isotope facilities at the WSL and promote interdisciplinary research at the WSL and beyond.