Using species co‐occurrence networks to assess the impacts of climate change

Abstract

Viable populations of species occur in a given place if three conditions are met: the environment at the place is suitable; the species is able to colonize it; co‐occurrence is possible despite or because of interactions with other species. Studies investigating the effects of climate change on species have mainly focused on measuring changes in climate suitability. Complex interactions among species have rarely been explored in such studies. We extend network theory to the analysis of complex patterns of co‐occurrence among species. The framework is used to explore the robustness of networks under climate change. With our data, we show that networks describing the geographic pattern of co‐occurrence among species display properties shared by other complex networks, namely that most species are poorly connected to other species in the network and only a few are highly connected. In our example, species more exposed to climate change tended to be poorly connected to other species within the network, while species more connected tended to be less exposed. Such high connectance would make the co‐occurrence networks more robust to climate change. The proposed framework illustrates how network analysis could be used, together with co‐occurrence data, to help addressing the potential consequences of species interactions in studies of climate change and biodiversity. However, more research is needed to test for links between co‐occurrence and network interactions.

An objective method based on assemblages of subfossil plant macro-remains to reconstruct past natural vegetation: a case study at Swifterbant, The Netherlands

“…Using these data, we split the subfossil samples, which are clearly a mixture of several vegetation types, into a number of groups of taxa likely to concur. Concurrence networks have recently been used by Araújo et al (2011) in studies on climate. For the taxon groups that we created, we identified the most similar plant association(s) described by Schaminée et al (1995aSchaminée et al ( , b, 1996Schaminée et al ( , 1998 and Stortelder et al (1999) via the analytic software package ASSOCIA (Van Tongeren et al 2008).…”

Co-occurrence patterns of fish species in two aquatic habitats of the Arauca River floodplain, Venezuela

“…In freshwater systems, this approach has been used to study some food webs (Power and Dietrich 2002) and fish trophic networks (Winemiller 1990). On the other hand, co-occurrence networks are being analyzed to study the assembly processes of a variety of organisms, from microbes community structure among ecosystems (Williams et al 2014) to bird mixed flocks in disturbance gradients (Mokross et al 2014), to tree communities (Morueta-Holme et al 2016), as well as to assess the impact of climate change on communities and biotic interactions (Araújo et al 2011). These networks offer the opportunity to identify the species that are the core of communities in terms of holding numerous links with other less connected species (Morueta-Holme et al 2016), and also their connectedness through measures of weighted degrees.…”

Uses and misuses of bioclimatic envelope modeling

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