The architecture of mutualistic networks as an evolutionary spandrel

Valverde, Sergi; Piñero, Jordi; Corominas-Murtra, Bernat; Montoya, José M.; Joppa, Lucas; Solé, Ricard V.

doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0383-4

Cited by 79 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(90 reference statements)

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“…For that reason, various studies suggest that the pervasiveness of the nested pattern in mutualistic 6 networks is a mere by-product of such community assembly rules, and not at emergent feature of species interactions as initially proposed ( Ollerton et al, 2003;Vázquez et al, 2005Vázquez et al, , 2009Araujo et al, 2010;Kallimanis et al, 2009;Jonhson et al, 2013;Valverde et al, 2018;Payrató-Borrás et al, 2019). For instance, the fact that reshuffling interactions within fixed core-periphery blocks results in almost the original nestedness value (Fig.…”

Section: Why a Core-periphery Structure?mentioning

confidence: 95%

Core-periphery structure in mutualistic networks: an epitaph for nestedness?

González

Vázquez

Ramos‐Jiliberto

et al. 2020

Preprint

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The calculation of nestedness has become a routine analysis in the study of ecological networks, as it is commonly associated with community resilience, robustness and species persistence. While meaningful in species distributional patterns, for an interaction matrix to be nested, specialist species must interact with ordered subsets of subsequently more generalized speciesnot just with a lower number of species. However, after reviewing 419 papers on mutualistic networks published since nestedness was introduced for the study of species interactions in 2003, we have found that only two theoretical studies considered explicitly ordered subsets. Instead, most studies interpret nestedness as a core of densely connected generalist species, surrounded by a periphery of specialist species attached to this corea so-called core-periphery structure . Such a topological feature is generally perceived as a core-periphery structure in network science. Here, we argue that the concept of core-periphery may be more relevant for studies on mutualistic networks than the concept of nestedness, as ecologists are usually not interested in exploring in detail the ordered subsets that characterize nestedness but instead use nestedness to describe a topology with a core of densely linked generalist species surrounded by a sparsely linked periphery of specialists. To illustrate our arguments and the quantification of core-periphery structures, we calculate core-periphery and nestedness in a large publicly available dataset of mutualistic networks. We also describe the calculation of core-periphery structures, its relationship with nestedness, and provide the code inside the R package econetwork for its calculation in mutualistic networks. We hope that our review will help ecologists to move beyond nestedness towards a more explicit representation of the structure of ecological networks.

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Section: Why a Core-periphery Structure?mentioning

confidence: 95%

Core-periphery structure in mutualistic networks: an epitaph for nestedness?

González

Vázquez

Ramos‐Jiliberto

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…, Valverde et al. ). However, knowledge about node linkage rules is still incipient, and we know little about whether these rules can scale up and shape entire networks (Ings et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…, Valverde et al. ). Despite several patterns being recovered by those models, the question of why networks present different topologies was seldom addressed (but see Leung and Weitz ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

A new model explaining the origin of different topologies in interaction networks

Pinheiro

Félix

Dormann

et al. 2019

Ecology

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Nestedness and modularity have been recurrently observed in species interaction networks. Some studies argue that those topologies result from selection against unstable networks, and others propose that they likely emerge from processes driving the interactions between pairs of species. Here we present a model that simulates the evolution of consumer species using resource species following simple rules derived from the integrative hypothesis of specialization (IHS). Without any selection on stability, our model reproduced all commonly observed network topologies. Our simulations demonstrate that resource heterogeneity drives network topology. On the one hand, systems containing only homogeneous resources form generalized nested networks, in which generalist consumers have higher performance on each resource than specialists. On the other hand, heterogeneous systems tend to have a compound topology: modular with internally nested modules, in which generalists that divide their interactions between modules have low performance. Our results demonstrate that all real‐world topologies likely emerge through processes driving interactions between pairs of species. Additionally, our simulations suggest that networks containing similar species differ from heterogeneous networks and that modules may not present the topology of entire networks.

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“…As it is known, species interaction networks are the result of different evolutionary and ecological processes acting at the individual and the collective level [59]. Because these processes typically yield to adaptation to lo-cal environments [20,61], it becomes useful to think about the relative importance of a network structure under a particular environmental setting. That is, the importance of a network structure should be studied under an environment-dependent framework [13,52].…”

Section: A Plea For An Environmentdependent Frameworkmentioning

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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The architecture of mutualistic networks as an evolutionary spandrel

Cited by 79 publications

References 56 publications

Core-periphery structure in mutualistic networks: an epitaph for nestedness?

Core-periphery structure in mutualistic networks: an epitaph for nestedness?

A new model explaining the origin of different topologies in interaction networks

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

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