Telling ecological networks apart by their structure: An environment-dependent approach
Name
pcbi.1007787.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.6 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
333920aa1215f11d572aeca29670dc82
Author(s)
Song, Chuliang
Saavedra, Serguei
Date Issued
April 2020
Journal
PLoS Computational Biology
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Citation
Song C, Saavedra S (2020) Telling ecological networks apart by their structure: An environment-dependent approach. PLoS Comput Biol 16(4)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 Song, Saavedra. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The network architecture of an ecological community describes the structure of species interactions established in a given place and time. It has been suggested that this architecture presents unique features for each type of ecological interaction: e.g., nested and modular architectures would correspond to mutualistic and antagonistic interactions, respectively. Recently, Michalska-Smith and Allesina (2019) proposed a computational challenge to test whether it is indeed possible to differentiate ecological interactions based on network architecture. Contrary to the expectation, they found that this differentiation is practically impossible, moving the question to why it is not possible to differentiate ecological interactions based on their network architecture alone. Here, we show that this differentiation becomes possible by adding the local environmental information where the networks were sampled. We show that this can be explained by the fact that environmental conditions are a con-founder of ecological interactions and network architecture. That is, the lack of association between network architecture and type of ecological interactions changes by conditioning on the local environmental conditions. Additionally, we find that environmental conditions are linked to the stability of ecological networks, but the direction of this effect depends on the type of interaction network. This suggests that the association between ecological interactions and network architectures exists, but cannot be fully understood without attention to the environmental conditions acting upon them.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/JOURNAL.PCBI.1007787
