The multilayer nature of ecological networks
By S. Pilosof, M. A. Porter, Mercedes Pascual, Sonia Kefi. Nature Ecology &Evolution, 2015
556 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Although networks provide a powerful approach to study a large variety of ecological systems, their formulation does not typically account for multiple interaction types, interactions that vary in space and time, and interconnected systems such as networks of networks. The emergent field of ‘multilayer networks’ provides a natural framework for extending analyses of ecological systems to include such multiple layers of complexity, as it specifically allows one to differentiate and model ‘intralayer’ and ‘interlayer’ connectivity. The framework provides a set of concepts and tools that can be adapted and applied to ecology, facilitating research on high-dimensional, heterogeneous systems in nature. Here, we formally define ecological multilayer networks based on a review of previous, related approaches; illustrate their application and potential with analyses of existing data; and discuss limitations, challenges, and future applications. The integration of multilayer network theory into ecology offers largely untapped potential to investigate ecological complexity and provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the architecture and dynamics of ecological systems.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ce0e8f84ad32393afaf6e80c6d1f95b28c07aab
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Citations in the corpus
- The Structure of Ecological Networks Across Levels of Organization (2020, background): “Food webs and multiple types of species-based networks are connected to each other by shared species, leading to networks of multiple types of interaction (Hale et al. 2020, Kéfi et al. 2016,Olff et al. 2009, Pilosof et al. 2017, Yeakel et al. 2020).”
- Machine Learning for Integrating Data in Biology and Medicine: Principles, Practice, and Opportunities (2018, background): “The vertical modeling typically depends on multiscale integration [26, 27, 23] of molecular, network, tissue, organism, and”
- Network science of biological systems at different scales: A review. (2017, background): “Especially the description of ecological systems could benefit from the application of this novel framework and is gaining popularity also due to the growing availability of ecological data (for review see [148]).”
- Cascading extinctions as a hidden driver of insect decline (2020, background): “Particularly developments on describing multilayer networks (Pilosof et al., 2017) and in using molecular biology to identify network nodes (Hrček & Godfray, 2015) are refining the way interaction networks can be constructed.”
- Resolving Food-Web Structure (2020, background): “Simultaneous sequence-based assessment of multiple interaction types from the same samples is well-suited for analysis using the kinds of multilayernetwork approaches now being developed, with the added advantage of having the data in a common currency (Pilosof et al. 2017).”
- Identifying Causes of Patterns in Ecological Networks: Opportunities and Limitations (2017, background): “…of given species change over time, space, and with community context (Laliberté & Tylianakis 2010, Rasmussen et al. 2013, Poisot et al. 2015, Pilosof et al. 2017)] and analyses using additional information beyond interaction topology and frequency [e.g., traits, abundances, phylogenies,…”