A network approach for identifying and delimiting biogeographical regions

Vilhena, Daril A.; Antonelli, Alexandre

doi:10.1038/ncomms7848

Cited by 199 publications

(228 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…1). Community detection approaches have also been applied to explore the compartmentalization of occurrence networks (50)(51)(52). We created a spatial cooccurrence network, that also had a bipartite structure, so that mite species constitute one subset of nodes and the countries and regions where they occur the other, establishing a link based on the presence of a given species in a given site.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geography and major host evolutionary transitions shape the resource use of plant parasites

Calatayud

Hórreo

Madrigal‐González

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The evolution of resource use in herbivores has been conceptualized as an analog of the theory of island biogeography, assuming that plant species are islands separated by phylogenetic distances. Despite its usefulness, this analogy has paradoxically led to neglecting real biogeographical processes in the study of macroevolutionary patterns of herbivore-plant interactions. Here we show that host use is mostly determined by the geographical cooccurrence of hosts and parasites in spider mites (Tetranychidae), a globally distributed group of plant parasites. Strikingly, geography accounts for most of the phylogenetic signal in host use by these parasites. Beyond geography, only evolutionary transitions among major plant lineages (i.e., gymnosperms, commelinids, and eudicots) shape resource use patterns in these herbivores. Still, even these barriers have been repeatedly overcome in evolutionary time, resulting in phylogenetically diverse parasite communities feeding on similar hosts. Therefore, our results imply that patterns of apparent evolutionary conservatism may largely be a byproduct of the geographic cooccurrence of hosts and parasites.evolutionary conservatism | geographic signal | host use evolution | parasite-host interactions | spider mites E cological interactions are commonly thought to be evolutionarily conserved (1). This idea roots back to Darwin and is based on the assumption that traits regulating interactions are mainly an ancestor's legacy. Following this rationale, it is expected that phylogenetically related species will also interact with partners that are phylogenetically clustered. Plants and the herbivores that feed on them constitute a large amount of the Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. However, the processes behind the origin of such diversity remain controversial (2). Related plant hosts tend to harbor similar communities of both herbivores (3-5) and pathogens (6, 7). Still, host shifts may be favored when they involve distantly related plants producing similar chemical compounds as defense against parasites (8). In fact, macroevolutionary evidence shows that host shifts of parasites to unrelated plants are common (9-13), questioning the ubiquity of evolutionary conservatism.These patterns of host use in parasites have led to the formulation of the "parasite paradox," which states that although parasites are generally specialized on a given (set of) host plant(s), host shifts to distantly related hosts occur frequently (14, 15). Further, the frequent shifts between evolutionarily distinct hosts observed in parasites have led to the analogy of considering plant species as resource islands separated by evolutionary distances (16)(17)(18). In this metaphor, related plants constitute resource archipelagos within which colonization of new resource islands entails few costs. Among such archipelagos, however, colonization processes may be costly, potentially leading to disruptive selection and hence to speciation via host shift (19,20). Paradoxically, framing the evolution of plant host use ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geography and major host evolutionary transitions shape the resource use of plant parasites

Calatayud

Hórreo

Madrigal‐González

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Nevertheless, we evaluated the overall meaningfulness of the dataset by comparing its biogeographical consistency with established knowledge. For this, we used a recent method based on network analysis 59 to identify biogeographical regions for tree species in Europe (Fig. 4, left panel), applying the online tool Infomap Bioregions 60 (http://bioregions.mapequation.org) at a spatial resolution of 0.5 degrees.…”

Section: Technical Validationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Comparison between the biogeographical classification obtained from our merged dataset using the procedure by Vilhena and Antonelli 59 at a resolution of 0.5×0.5 degrees ( a ), the classification by Rueda et al 61 (upscaled to the same resolution to ease comparison, b ), and the European classification of biogeographical regions ( c ).…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

EU-Forest, a high-resolution tree occurrence dataset for Europe

2017

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We present EU-Forest, a dataset that integrates and extends by almost one order of magnitude the publicly available information on European tree species distribution. The core of our dataset (~96% of the occurrence records) came from an unpublished, large database harmonising forest plot surveys from National Forest Inventories on an INSPIRE-compliant 1 km×1 km grid. These new data can potentially benefit several disciplines, including forestry, biodiversity conservation, palaeoecology, plant ecology, the bioeconomy, and pest management.

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“…Recently, network methods have been applied to detect bioregions as an alternative to clustering methods (Carstensen and Olesen 2009, Thébault 2013, Vilhena and Antonelli 2015. In this approach the network is bipartite, with two sets of nodes; locations and taxa, with the taxa linked to locations in which they are present.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of network and clustering methods to detect biogeographical regions

2017

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Bioregions are an important concept in biogeography, and are key to our understanding of biodiversity patterns across the world. The use of networks in biogeography to produce bioregions is a relatively novel approach that has been proposed to improve upon current methods. However, it remains unclear if they may be used in place of current methods and/or offer additional biogeographic insights. We compared two network methods to detect bioregions (modularity and map equation) with the conventional distance-based clustering method. We also explored the relationship between network and biodiversity metrics. For the analysis we used two datasets of iconic Australian plant groups at a continental scale, Acacia and eucalypts, as example groups. The modularity method detected fewer large bioregions produced the most succinct bioregionalisation for both plant groups corresponding to Australian biomes, while map equation detected many small bioregions including interzones at a natural scale of one. The clustering method was less sensitive than network methods in detecting bioregions. The network metric called participation coefficient from both network partition methods identified interzones or transition zones between bioregions. Furthermore, another network metric (betweenness) was highly correlated to richness and endemism. We conclude that the application of networks to biogeography offers a number of advantages and provides novel insights. More specifically, our study showed that these network partition methods were more efficient than the clustering method for bioregionalisation of continental-scale data in: 1) the identification of bioregions and 2) the quantification of biogeographic transition zones using the participation coefficient metric. The use of network methods and especially the participation coefficient metric adds to bioregionalisation by identifying transition zones which could be useful for conservation purposes and identifying biodiversity hotspots.

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A network approach for identifying and delimiting biogeographical regions

Cited by 199 publications

References 59 publications

Geography and major host evolutionary transitions shape the resource use of plant parasites

Geography and major host evolutionary transitions shape the resource use of plant parasites

EU-Forest, a high-resolution tree occurrence dataset for Europe

A comparison of network and clustering methods to detect biogeographical regions

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