A Probabilistic View of Forbidden Links: Their Prevalence and Their Consequences for the Robustness of Plant-Hummingbird Communities.

The presence in ecological communities of unfeasible species interactions, termed forbidden links, due to physiological or morphological exploitation barriers has been long debated, but little direct evidence has been found. Forbidden links are likely to make ecological communities less robust to species extinctions, stressing the need to assess their prevalence. Here, we used a dataset of plant-hummingbird interactions, coupled with a Bayesian hierarchical model, to assess the importance of exploitation barriers in determining species interactions.

Correction to: Local drivers of the structure of a tropical bird‑seed dispersal network.

Unfortunately, the detailed description of the ESM material went wrong in the published version of the dataset.

Local drivers of the structure of a tropical bird-seed dispersal network.

One of the major challenges in ecology is to understand the relative importance of neutral- and niche-based processes structuring species interactions within communities. The concept of neutral-based processes posits that network structure is a result of interactions between species based on their abundance. On the other hand, niche-based processes presume that network structure is shaped by constraints to interactions.