Bringing Elton and Grinnell Together: a quantitative framework to represent the biogeography of ecological interaction networks
By Dominique Gravel, Benjamin Baiser, Jennifer A. Dunne, J. Kopelke, Neo D. Martinez, T. Nyman, Timothée Poisot, Daniel B. Stouffer, J. Tylianakis, Spencer A. Wood and 1 more. bioRxiv, 2016
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Biogeography has traditionally focused on the spatial distribution and abundance of species. Both are driven by the way species interact with one another, but also by the way these interactions vary across time and space. Here, we call for an integrated approach, adopting the view that community structure is best represented as a network of ecological interactions, and show how it translates to biogeography questions. We propose that the ecological niche should encompass the effect of the environment on species distribution (the Grinnellian dimension of the niche) and on the ecological interactions among them (the Eltonian dimension). Starting from this concept, we develop a quantitative theory to explain turnover of interactions in space and time i.e. a novel approach to interaction distribution modelling. We apply this framework to host parasite interactions across Europe and find that two aspects of the environment (temperature and precipitation) exert a strong imprint on species co-occurrence, but not on species interactions. Even where species co-occur, interaction proves to be stochastic rather than deterministic, adding to variation in realized network structure. We also find that a large majority of host-parasite pairs are never found together, thus precluding any inferences regarding their probability to interact. This first attempt to explain variation of network structure at large spatial scales opens new perspectives at the interface of species distribution modelling and community ecology.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2485543d641effe57ca0df971d2efff6ea2c3dfd
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Ecological Modeling
In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- The Structure of Ecological Networks Across Levels of Organization (2020, background): “…of interaction patterns at the local level, variation in specialization across space, and spatial processes that determine species occurrence (Albouy et al. 2019; Baiser et al. 2019; Braga et al. 2019; Galiana et al. 2018; Gravel et al. 2011, 2018; Poisot et al. 2014; Tylianakis & Morris 2017).”