Habitat modification effects on anuran food webs in the Colombian tropical dry forest Argelina Blanco-Torres a,b, ⁎, María Argenis Bonilla b , Luciano Cagnolo c a Corporación Universidad de la Costa, Departamento de Ciencias Naturales y Exactas, Calle 58 No. 55-66, Bloque 1 Piso 4, Barranquilla, Colombia b Grupo de Investigación en Biología de Organismos Tropicales, Departamento de Biología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Bogotá, Avenida 30 No. 45-03, Edificio 421, Laboratorio 224, Bogotá, Colombia c Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal, FCEFyN, UNC-CONICET, Av. Vélez Sársfield 1611, Ed, Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas, Ciudad Universitaria, Córdoba, Argentina abstract article info Article history: Received 22 October 2019 Received in revised form 21 November 2019 Accepted 21 November 2019 Keywords: Predation Networks Generality Vulnerability Habitat loss and transformation are major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, but their effects on species interaction are often poorly understood. We evaluated effects of habitat transformation and seasonality on anuran-prey food webs in Colombian dry-forests. We asked whether anthropic transformation (anthropic vs natural) and/or seasonality (dry, minor and major rain seasons) affect predator load on arthropods, the occur- rence of energetic bottlenecks, and the diet overlap of anurans. We selected six dry forest sites in the Caribbean of Colombia, sampled anurans, and identified their stomach contents to construct anuran-prey food webs. We show that the global structure of food webs was affected by disturbance and seasonality, but not by their interaction. Prey vulnerability was higher in anthropic habitats. Habitat transformation enhanced diet overlap among pred- ators, but there was not a differential effect of habitat type according to seasonality for network metrics. Our study shows a strong effect of natural vegetation modification in tropical dry forest on anuran-prey food webs, while seasonality did not seem to further mediate these effects. © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Ecological communities are connected by direct and indirect associ- ations among species, shaping complex networks of interactions (Lang et al., 2014), whose topology departs from randomness as a conse- quence of different evolutionary, ecological, and neutral processes (Akin and Winemiller, 2006; Vázquez et al., 2009). Habitat loss and human-driven modification of forests are major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Sala et al., 2000; Hooper et al., 2012), but their effects on species interactions can be difficult to describe (Laliberté and Tylianakis, 2010; Gagic et al., 2012; Rivera Vasconcelos et al., 2019). The ways in which species are affected by anthropic distur- bances may dictate changes in food web structure; for example, species with few links (i.e., specialists) are more extinction prone than species with several links (i.e., generalists) (Cagnolo et al., 2009; Visser et al., 2011). Consequently, loss of specialists in food webs after anthropic dis- turbance events may lead to more connected networks (Valladares et al., 2012). Moreover, the loss of species and their interactions may concentrate energy fluxes into fewer links, leading to a reduction in the evenness of interaction frequency (Wootton et al., 1996; Tylianakis et al., 2007; O'Gorman et al., 2012). Studies evaluating effects of human-driven changes in habitat on terrestrial food webs often re- port reductions in network size and interaction evenness, as well as shortening of food chain lengths (e.g., Tylianakis et al., 2007; Valladares et al., 2012; Muhly et al., 2013). Land-use change usually reduces the structural complexity of forests (Barlow et al., 2010). In simplified habitats, diversity of micro-habitats and amount of available space is reduced and resilient species tend to co-occur more often (Kay et al., 2017; Zarnetske et al., 2017). Species forced to co-occur consume available prey items, resulting in an in- creased trophic niche overlap (López et al., 2015; Kuhnen et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2018). High levels of trophic overlap could increase compe- tition, which would affect species' fitness (Sebastián et al., 2015; Buxton and Sperry, 2016; Namukonde et al., 2018). Disturbance effects on communities could be exacerbated by cli- matic events. Seasonality has a strong influence on species interaction dynamics and, consequently, in energy flux within an ecosystem (Woodward and Hildrew, 2002; McCann et al., 2005). In ecosystems with strong seasonality (e.g., with rainy and dry seasons), population sizes fluctuate according to temperature and precipitation (Winemiller, 1990; Winemiller and Jepsen, 1998). When prey popula- tions decline, food webs may experience bottlenecks of energy flows, increasing susceptibility to disturbance events (Dunne et al., 2002; Peralta-Maraver et al., 2017). Evidence reflects seasonal changes in Food Webs 22 (2020) e00133 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Corporación Universidad de la Costa, Departamento de Ciencias Naturales y Exactas, Calle 58 No. 55-66, Bloque 1 Piso 4, Barranquilla, Colombia. E-mail address: argelinab@gmail.com (A. Blanco-Torres). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fooweb.2019.e00133 2352-2496/© 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 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