Resource subsides moving across habitat boundaries can have profound consequences in recipient communities and ecosystems. Accumulating evidence suggests that inputs of resource subsidies are temporally variable (i.e., pulsed) and often unpredictable for consumers. These temporal aspects of resource fluxes can strongly mediate the capacity for individual consumers to capitalize on subsidies, and in turn the potential for higher-level responses in populations and communities.

In this symposium, we aim at mechanistic understanding of how pulsed resource subsidies can drive community dynamics and ecosystem processes. We first illustrate how recipient consumers capture these pulsed subsidies at the individual- and population-level. Then, through empirical and theoretical examples, we demonstrate how consumer responses to subsidy pulses can cascade up or down to affect community dynamics and ecosystem processes. Throughout the symposium, we discuss how studying community-level consequences of pulsed subsidies can contribute to improve our understanding about temporally-dynamic maintenance and functioning of ecological communities.