Human Impacts and Climate Change Influence Nestedness and Modularity in Food-Web and Mutualistic Networks

Takemoto, Kazuhiro; Kajihara, Kosuke

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0157929

Cited by 36 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 59 publications

(120 reference statements)

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“…For example, modular and nested structures have been positively associated with community persistence in antagonistic and mutualistic communities, respectively (Thébault & Fontaine, 2010). Thus, changes in a presumed important network structure in a community across temporal or environmental gradients have been directly translated to changes in robustness (Dalsgaard et al, 2013;Takemoto & Kajihara, 2016;Welti & Joern, 2015). Moreover, this view has led other studies to suggest that the absence of a given structural pattern in a community can be related to the lack of importance of such network structure overall (James et al, 2013;Strona & Veech, 2015).…”

Section: Linking Ne T Work S Truc Ture and Persis Tencementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework

Cenci

Song

Saavedra

2018

Ecology and Evolution

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A major quest in network and community ecology has been centered on understanding the importance of structural patterns in species interaction networks—the synthesis of who interacts with whom in a given location and time. In the past decades, much effort has been devoted to infer the importance of a particular structure by its capacity to tolerate an external perturbation on its structure or dynamics. Here, we demonstrate that such a perspective leads to inconsistent conclusions. That is, the importance of a network structure changes as a function of the external perturbations acting on a community at any given point in time. Thus, we discuss a research agenda to investigate the relative importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework. We hypothesize that only by studying systematically the link between network structure and community dynamics under an environment‐dependent framework, we can uncover the limits at which communities can tolerate environmental changes.

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Section: Linking Ne T Work S Truc Ture and Persis Tencementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework

Cenci

Song

Saavedra

2018

Ecology and Evolution

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“…When initial connectance was high, there were more nonzero elements in the food web matrix, such that top-down control had a higher probability to remove prey species, which leads to a broader richness gradient (Fig 4). Food-web rewiring along environmental gradients has been often observed [58–59]. Our results show that such events may alter richness-connectance relationships by changing richness gradients.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 51%

The combined effects of biotic and abiotic stress on species richness and connectance

Kulkarni

Laender

2017

PLoS ONE

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Food web structure and species richness are both subject to biotic (e.g. predation pressure and resource limitation) and abiotic stress (e.g. environmental change). We investigated the combined effects of both types of stress on richness and connectance, and on their relationship, in a predator-prey system. To this end, we developed a mathematical two trophic level food-web model to investigate the effects of biotic and abiotic stress on food web connectance and species richness. We found negative effects of top-down and bottom-up control on prey and predator richness, respectively. Effects of top-down and bottom-up control were stronger when initial connectance was high and low, respectively. Bottom-up control could either aggravate or buffer negative effects of top-down control. Abiotic stress affecting predator richness had positive indirect effects on prey richness, but only when initial connectance was low. However, no indirect effects on predator richness were observed following direct effects on prey richness. Top-down and bottom-up control selected for weakly connected prey and highly connected predators, thereby decreasing and increasing connectance, respectively. Our simulations suggest a broad range of negative and positive richness-connectance relationships, thereby revisiting the often found negative relationship between richness and connectance in food webs. Our results suggest that (1) initial food-web connectance strongly influences the effects of biotic stress on richness and the occurrence of indirect effects on richness; and (2) the shape of the richness-connectance relationship depends on the type of biotic stress.

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“…For example, modular and nested structures have been positively associated with community persistence in antagonistic and mutualistic communities, respectively [57]. Thus, changes of a presumed important network structure in a community across temporal or environmental gradients have been directly translated to changes in robustness [16,56,64]. Moreover, this view has led other studies to suggest that the absence of a given structural pattern in a community can be related to the lack of importance of such network structure overall [26,55].…”

Section: Linking Network Structure and Persistencementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment-dependent framework

Cenci

Song

Saavedra

2017

Preprint

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A major quest in network and community ecology has been centered on understanding the importance of structural patterns in species interaction networks-the synthesis of who interacts with whom in a given location and time. In the past decades, much effort has been devoted on linking the importance of a particular structure to its capacity to tolerate random external perturbations. Here we advocate that such a perspective is inconsistent. We show that the importance of a network structure depends on the environmental conditions faced by a community at any given point in time. We discuss a research agenda to systematically investigate the importance of ecological networks under an environment-dependent framework. We hypothesize that only by linking network structure, community persistence, and environmental variations, we can be able to increase our understanding about both the existence of structural patterns in ecological networks and how communities may respond under future scenarios of climate change.

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Human Impacts and Climate Change Influence Nestedness and Modularity in Food-Web and Mutualistic Networks

Cited by 36 publications

References 59 publications

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework

The combined effects of biotic and abiotic stress on species richness and connectance

Rethinking the importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment-dependent framework

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