The Robustness and Restoration of a Network of Ecological Networks

By Michael J. O. Pocock, D. Evans, J. Memmott. Science, 2012

602 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Networks of Networks Quantitative networks, such as those represented by food webs, have become an important way of investigating the structure of ecological communities, but thus far only encompass a small subset of species. Pocock et al. (p. 973) have linked seven different types of ecological networks to form a network of networks. They found that although networks varied in their robustness to species loss, they did not strongly co-vary; that is, what happens to one network is unrelated to what happens to another. The networks studied were identified from an agroecosystem in the southwestern UK, a habitat in which biodiversity has suffered substantially. This study succeeded in revealing which species are potential targets for restoration of ecological function in this and other systems. Analysis of seven interconnected networks on a farm reveals that they vary in their fragility, but that they do not covary. Understanding species’ interactions and the robustness of interaction networks to species loss is essential to understand the effects of species’ declines and extinctions. In most studies, different types of networks (such as food webs, parasitoid webs, seed dispersal networks, and pollination networks) have been studied separately. We sampled such multiple networks simultaneously in an agroecosystem. We show that the networks varied in their robustness; networks including pollinators appeared to be particularly fragile. We show that, overall, networks did not strongly covary in their robustness, which suggests that ecological restoration (for example, through agri-environment schemes) benefitting one functional group will not inevitably benefit others. Some individual plant species were disproportionately well linked to many other species. This type of information can be used in restoration management, because it identifies the plant taxa that can potentially lead to disproportionate gains in biodiversity.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/030c95d2d28b689b9d9593aa67d6cb033d8ef3f3

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Citations in the corpus

Migratory Animals Couple Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Worldwide (2014, background): “Although multiplex networks are still rare in ecological studies (68, 69), coextinction cascades can be dramatically accelerated when feedbacks between multiple networks are included (68).”
Merging DNA metabarcoding and ecological network analysis to understand and build resilient terrestrial ecosystems (2016, background): “Robustness 445 analysis can be developed further to determine the relative importance of species within the 446 networks, for example their contribution to network robustness (Pocock et al. 2012) thus 447 complementing structural measures of species important in networks (Jordan 2009).”
Coupled disease–behavior dynamics on complex networks: A review (2015, background): “The broad applicability of multilayer networks and their success in providing insight into the structure and dynamics of realistic systems have thus generated considerable excitement [105] [106] [107] [108] [109] .”
Describe, understand and predict: why do we need networks in ecology? (2016, background): “As such multilayer data sets are also emerging recently in ecology (Meli an et al. 2009; Olesen et al. 2011; Pocock et al. 2012; K efi et al. 2015, 2016; Pilosof et al. 2015; Sander et al. 2015), the application of these new tools to ecological data sets will provide a more detailed understanding of”
Impacts of Invasive Species on Food Webs: A Review of Empirical Data (2017, background): “The structure and stability of networks containing different interaction types is a recent topic (Fontaine et al., 2011; Georgelin and Loeuille, 2014; K efi et al., 2012) and we have little data on such complete networks (but see Melian et al., 2009; Pocock et al., 2012).”
Network science of biological systems at different scales: A review. (2017, background): “It has been argued that formulating ecological systems as MLN does not only offer additional perspectives into the architecture and dynamics of ecological systems, but also more ﬁrmly evaluates their robustness to perturbations, which is a critical element in restoration management [148,165].”
Robustness and resilience of complex networks (2024, background): “…the most common approach 70 involves percolation-related metrics, such as monitoring the size of the largest connected component (LCC) and stopping the attack once it has reached a given target size, although other network metrics such as efficiency 59,71 or nestedness 50,51,72 have been used.”
Priority effects and ecological restoration (2020, background): “Examples in the literature include reducing invasive species (Abraham et al. 2009; Stuble et al. 2016; Lang et al. 2017), sustaining species that promote pollinator communities (Pocock et al. 2012), improving nutrient cycling, or increasing ecosystem productivity (Popp et al. 2017).”
Massively Introduced Managed Species and Their Consequences for Plant–Pollinator Interactions (2017, background): “visits in field margins (Stanley, 2013) or in all managed and nonmanaged farmland habitats (Pocock et al., 2012).”
Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity. (2012, background): “Simulations based on network structure use random or systematic removal of certain species from empirical food webs can predict which species are left without interacting partners and would thus go secondarily extinct [71].”
Structure–stability relationships in networks combining mutualistic and antagonistic interactions (2014, background): “…natural ecological networks, the structure corresponds to that of the few existing empirical datasets describing networks of different interaction types (i.e. plants interacting with pollinators and phytophagous animals, such as in Melián et al. 2009, Fontaine et al. 2011 and Pocock et al. 2012).”
Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators (2016, background): “within a wider network of community interactions (Memmott, 1999; Pocock et al., 2012).”
The multilayer nature of ecological networks (2015, background): “ do not [46,47]. Thus far, the primary way in which the problem of dierent interaction 7 types has been tackled is by merging networks with dierent interaction types through a common set of species [45,48,49]. For example, Melian et al. [45] compiled an ecological network that combines two mutualist”