Volatility of network indices due to undersampling of intraspecific variation in plant–insect interactions

Kuppler, Jonas; Grasegger, Tobias; Peters, Birte; Popp, Susanne; Schlager, Martin; Junker, Robert R.

doi:10.1007/s11829-016-9493-1

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Intraspecific variation is increasingly recognized as an important factor in the study of ecological networks, with several recent studies demonstrating its potential in influencing network structure (Woodward et al 2010, Gilljam et al 2011, Barbour et al 2016, Kuppler et al 2017. Despite this, no work has directly addressed how the variation that exists across an individual's ontogeny (e.g., its life stages) affect structure, despite its ubiquity and potential importance in influencing network structure (Werner andGilliam 1984, Rudolf andLafferty 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Individuals within the same species vary in their size, morphology, behavior, and physiology (Bolnick et al 2002, Woodward et al 2010. Such variation can result in differences in the ecological interactions that individuals of a given species are part of, which in turn may scale up to community-wide changes in ecological network structure and dynamics (Woodward et al 2010, Bolnick et al 2011, Gilljam et al 2011, Kuppler et al 2017.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The impact of intraspecific variation on food web structure

Clegg

Ali

Beckerman

2018

Ecology

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Accounting for the variation that occurs within species in food webs can theoretically result in significant changes in both network structure and dynamics. However, there has been little work exploring their role with empirical data. In particular, the variation associated with species’ life cycles, which is prevalent and represents both trait variation and taxonomic identity, has received little attention. Here, we characterize the structural consequences of life stage variation in five food webs, including a newly compiled web from the Arabian Gulf. We show that making life stage variation explicit in food webs results in larger food webs that possess consistent structural changes that are separate from the changes in structure that come simply from increasing the number of nodes in the webs. Furthermore, we show that the magnitude of these changes is related to ontogenetic specialism, the degree of overlap in the ecological niches of life stages. These results demonstrate the capacity of intraspecific variation to affect ecological networks and indicate the potential usefulness of stage‐structured food webs, which capture size and taxonomic information, to represent variation below the species level.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of intraspecific variation on food web structure

Clegg

Ali

Beckerman

2018

Ecology

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“…Furthermore, Kuppler et al. () showed that high intraspecific variation coupled with low sampling effort leads to unreliability of aggregated network statistics such as modularity. On the other hand, sampling at the individual level would also increase the degree of spatial heterogeneity captured within a plant population, potentially capturing more variation in pollinator assemblages and a higher number of HP morphotypes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…HP networks, however, as with other types of species interaction networks, are subject to sampling bias and statistical limitations associated with insufficient sampling effort (VVázquez et al., ; Blüthgen, ; Rivera‐Hutinel et al., ; Kuppler et al., ). Surprisingly, the number of stigmas observed to score HP deposition has been highly variable both within and across studies of HP transfer networks (3 to >30 stigmas per species; e.g., Fang and Huang, ; Emer et al., ; Tur et al., ), and in some cases the sampling effort for the species studied is not clearly disclosed.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This reduced and unequal sampling is worrisome given that a key assumption in network analysis is that the observed interactions constitute an adequate sample of the entire set of interactions present in the community. Furthermore, a large body of literature has documented how sampling effort can have a strong influence on the probability of observing species interactions (e.g., Herrera, ), thus affecting the total number of links in the overall network structure (e.g., Goldwasser and Roughgarden, ; Nielsen and Bascompte, ; Vazquez et al., ; Rivera‐Hutinel et al., ; Kuppler et al., ). Thus, limited sampling could lead to the mischaracterization of network structure, and thus misinterpretation of patterns of specialization and modularity (e.g., Kuppler et al., ).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Variation in sampling effort affects the observed richness of plant–plant interactions via heterospecific pollen transfer: implications for interpretation of pollen transfer networks

Arceo‐Gómez

Alonso

Ashman

et al. 2018

American J of Botany

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The wide heterogeneity in the sampling effort required to accurately characterize pollen transfer interactions observed has the potential to influence the characterization of pollen transfer dynamics. Thus, sampling completeness should be considered in future studies to avoid overestimation of modularity and specialization in pollen transfer networks that may bias the predicted causes and expected consequences of such processes for plant-plant interactions.

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Linking host plants to damage types in the fossil record of insect herbivory

Schachat¹,

Payne²,

Boyce³

2023

Paleobiology

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Studies of insect herbivory on fossilized leaves tend to focus on a few, relatively simple metrics that are agnostic to the distribution of insect damage types among host plants. More complex metrics that link particular damage types to particular host plants have the potential to address additional ecological questions, but such metrics can be biased by sampling incompleteness due to the difficulty of distinguishing the true absence of a particular interaction from the failure to detect it—a challenge that has been raised in the ecological literature. We evaluate a range of methods for characterizing the relationships between damage types and host plants by performing resampling and subsampling exercises on a variety of datasets. We found that the components of beta diversity provide a more valid, reliable, and interpretable method for comparing component communities than do bipartite network metrics and that the rarefaction of interactions represent a valid, reliable, and interpretable method for comparing compound communities. Both beta diversity and rarefaction of interactions avoid the potential pitfalls of multiple comparisons. Finally, we found that the host specificity of individual damage types is challenging to assess. Whereas bipartite network metrics are sufficiently biased by sampling incompleteness to be inappropriate for fossil herbivory data, alternatives exist that are perfectly suitable for fossil datasets with sufficient sample coverage.

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Volatility of network indices due to undersampling of intraspecific variation in plant–insect interactions

Abstract: the robustness of commonly applied network indices, confirm the urge for a sufficient and representative sampling of interactions, and emphasize the significance of intraspecific variation in the context of communities and networks.

Cited by 9 publications

References 35 publications

The impact of intraspecific variation on food web structure

The impact of intraspecific variation on food web structure

Variation in sampling effort affects the observed richness of plant–plant interactions via heterospecific pollen transfer: implications for interpretation of pollen transfer networks

Linking host plants to damage types in the fossil record of insect herbivory

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