AI Article Synopsis
- Some species, known as 'generalists,' thrive in a variety of habitats, while 'specialists' are adapted to specific environments, and their coexistence is maintained through complex interspecies interactions.
- The study aims to establish a theoretical framework for understanding how these generalist and specialist species coexist in ecosystems with both mutualistic and competitive relationships.
- Findings show that generalists are crucial for ecosystem stability, as their removal can lead to ecosystem collapse, while the loss of specialists typically does not have the same drastic effect.
Article Abstract
As an ecological strategy for species coexistence, some species adapt to a wide range of habitats, while others specialize in particular environments. Such 'generalists' and 'specialists' achieve normal ecological balance through a complex network of interactions between species. However, the role of these interactions in maintaining the coexistence of generalist and specialist species has not been elucidated within a general theoretical framework. Here, we analyze the ecological mechanism for the coexistence of specialist and generalist species in a class of mutualistic and competitive interaction ecosystems based on the network dimension reduction method. We find that ecological specialists and generalists can be identified based on the number of their respective interactions. We also find, using real-world empirical network simulations, that the removal of ecological generalists can lead to the collapse of local ecosystems, which is rarely observed with the loss of ecological specialists.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10880134 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10967 | DOI Listing |
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