Edge effect imprint on elemental traits of plant-invertebrate food web components of oilseed rape fields

Of fundamental importance for the functioning of a community is the flow of energy and elements through its components. However, the question of how (if at all) the edge effect of habitats can drive elemental traits of organisms has hitherto been largely neglected issue in ecosystem ecology at the community level. We quantified the abundance of invertebrates and measured the elemental composition (K, Na, Ca, Mg, Cu, Zn, Fe, Mn, As, Cd, Co and Pb) of 15 different organisms within the plant-invertebrate food web (plant – oilseed rape pests/herbivores – pollinators = wild bees – saprovores – predators – parasitoids) sampled in 34 fields of a key bioenergy crop that is an exceptionally strong biodiversity driver, the oilseed rape. Then these were related to the individual field edge habitat features (including typically anthropogenic ones like dirt and tarred roads) measured within a 100 m radius around the invertebrate sampling sites. Our study showed that elemental traits of the plant-invertebrate food web components in oilseed rape crops varied owing to the habitat specificity determined at the relatively small spatial scale of an individual field, and that the elemental traits of these organisms differed from both an inter- and an intra-guild perspective. The major mechanistic explanation for most of these relationships seems to derive from the secondary gut content effect. Determining one single state for the homeostatic/stoichiometric regulation of chemical elements in invertebrates based on the application of whole-body metal concentrations is in principle impossible, because of the unknown noise caused by the inclusion of extracellular portions of metals in the analysis. It is thus imperative to develop consistent principles for assessing elemental traits of organisms that are based on highly sensitive and high-throughput analytical methods for the ionomic profiling of microsamples at the organ, tissue, cellular or even sub-cellular levels.