AI Article Synopsis
- - The study explores how the structure of mutualistic systems (where different species rely on each other) affects their resilience to species extinction.
- - It finds that a nested contact pattern—where some species interact with more species than others—enhances robustness, particularly if the species with fewer connections are more likely to go extinct.
- - A new coefficient is introduced that quantifies the robustness of these mutualistic systems, allowing for better evaluation of their stability.
Article Abstract
We investigate the relationship between the nested organization of mutualistic systems and their robustness against the extinction of species. We establish that a nested pattern of contacts is the best possible one as far as robustness is concerned, but only when the least linked species have the greater probability of becoming extinct. We introduce a coefficient that provides a quantitative measure of the robustness of a mutualistic system.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2007.07.030 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Wild Bee Diversity and Bee-Plant Interactions in Tropical and Temperate Forest Clearings in a Natural Protected Area in Central West Mexico.
Insects
December 2024
Departamento de Botánica y Zoología, Centro Universitario de Ciencias Biológicas y Agropecuarias (CUCBA), Universidad de Guadalajara, Zapopan 44600, Jalisco, Mexico.
Background: Bees rely on plants for nutrition and reproduction, making the preservation of natural areas crucial as pollinator reservoirs. Seasonal tropical dry forests are among the richest habitats for bees, but only 27% of their original extent remains in Mexico. In contrast, temperate forests harbor fewer bee species and face high deforestation rates, with 40% of their area converted to other land uses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReviving collapsed plant-pollinator networks from a single species.
PLoS Biol
October 2024
Faculty of Biology, Theoretical Biology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany.
Mutualistic ecological networks can suddenly transition to undesirable states due to small changes in environmental conditions. Recovering from such a collapse can be difficult as restoring the original environmental conditions may be infeasible. Additionally, such networks can also exhibit a phenomenon known as hysteresis, whereby the system could exhibit multiple states under the same environmental conditions, implying that ecological networks may not recover.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Interplay of Binary and Quantitative Structure on the Stability of Mutualistic Networks.
Integr Comp Biol
September 2024
Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195, USA.
Understanding how the structure of biological systems impacts their resilience (broadly defined) is a recurring question across multiple levels of biological organization. In ecology, considerable effort has been devoted to understanding how the structure of interactions between species in ecological networks is linked to different broad resilience outcomes, especially local stability. Still, nearly all of that work has focused on interaction structure in presence-absence terms and has not investigated quantitative structure, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStructural dynamics of plant-pollinator mutualistic networks.
PNAS Nexus
June 2024
Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Rambla del Poblenou, 154 08018, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
The discourse surrounding the structural organization of mutualistic interactions mostly revolves around modularity and nestedness. The former is known to enhance the stability of communities, while the latter is related to their feasibility, albeit compromising the stability. However, it has recently been shown that the joint emergence of these structures poses challenges that can eventually lead to limitations in the dynamic properties of mutualistic communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStability, resilience and eco-evolutionary feedbacks of mutualistic networks to rising temperature.
J Anim Ecol
August 2024
Faculty of Biology, Theoretical Biology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany.
Ecological networks comprising of mutualistic interactions can suddenly transition to undesirable states, such as collapse, due to small changes in environmental conditions such as a rise in local environmental temperature. However, little is known about the capacity of such interaction networks to adapt to a rise in temperature and the occurrence of critical transitions. Here, combining quantitative genetics and mutualistic dynamics in an eco-evolutionary framework, we evaluated the stability and resilience of mutualistic networks to critical transitions as environmental temperature increases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!