Fatty acid biomarkers reveal landscape influences on linkages between aquatic and terrestrial food webs

Stream and riparian habitats are meta-ecosystems that can be strongly connected via the emergence of aquatic insects, which form an important prey subsidy for terrestrial consumers. Anthropogenic perturbations that impact these habitats may indirectly propagate across traditional ecosystem boundaries, thus weakening aquatic-terrestrial food web linkages. We investigated how algal production, aquatic invertebrates, and terrestrial spiders influence cross-ecosystem connectivity in temperate streams across four European catchments with varying levels of human disturbance. We used fatty acid biomarkers to measure putative aquatic linkages to riparian spiders. Variation partitioning analysis indicated that aquatic insect dispersal traits explained a relatively large proportion of variability in the fatty acid profile of spiders. Trophic connectivity, as measured by the proportion of the polyunsaturated fatty acid eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and the ratio of EPA to its chemical precursor, alp..., Methods of data collection/generation: See manuscript for details., # Data from: Fatty acid biomarkers reveal landscape influences on linkages between aquatic and terrestrial food webs

### Dataset Information

* Authors: Francis J. Burdon
* Other contributors: Jasmina Sargac, Ellinor Ramberg, Cristina Popescu, Nita Darmina, Corina Bradu, Marie A. E. Forio, Felix Witing, Benjamin Kupilas, Danny C. P. Lau, Martin Volk, Geta Rîşnoveanu, Peter Goethals, Nikolai Friberg, Richard K. Johnson, Brendan G. McKie
* Date created: 2025-06-09
* Date last modified: 2025-06-26
* Embargo Provenance: n/a
* Scope of embargo: n/a
* Embargo period: n/a

### Dataset Version and Pre-release History

* #### Current Version:
* Number: 1.2
* Date: 2025-06-26
* Persistent identifier: [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.931zcrjxz](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.931zcrjxz)
* Summary of changes: Updated data package by removing figures, added Supplemental Information containing figures for Zenodo deposit with CC-BY license applied, updated the readme file

- #### Previous Version...,