Complexity and fragility in ecological networks

By Ricard V. Sole Jose M. Montoya. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 2000

786 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A detailed analysis of three species–rich ecosystem food webs has shown that they display skewed distributions of connections. Such graphs of interaction are, in fact, shared by a number of biological and technological networks, which have been shown to display a very high homeostasis against random removals of nodes. Here, we analyse the responses of these ecological graphs to both random and selective perturbations (directed against the most–connected species). Our results suggest that ecological networks are very robust against random removals but can be extremely fragile when selective attacks are used. These observations have important consequences for biodiversity dynamics and conservation issues, current estimations of extinction rates and the relevance and definition of keystone species.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d4d46d8e70425f3b71d5f07f98d27f8be503935

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Citations in the corpus

Network ecology: topological constraints on ecosystem dynamics (2004, background): “Of course, the degree can be averaged over all nodes in a network (Dav), its standard deviation can be calculated (Dstd), or its distribution can also be analyzed ((150; 106; 107; 38; 37), but these latter network properties are not real global indices: these network indices result from averaging th”
Network structure and robustness of marine food webs (2004, background): “Marine food webs generally show high structural robustness to species loss compared to other food webs analyzed previously (Solé & Montoya 2001, Dunne et al. 2002a), which appears related to their relatively high connectance (Fig.”
Frugivores at higher risk of extinction are the key elements of a mutualistic network (2014, background): “For instance, the extinction of highly connected species may lead to co-extinctions (Solé and Montoya 2001, Memmott et al. 2004) and possibly affect the evolutionary dynamics of the whole network (Guimarães et al. 2011).”
A Graph‐Theory Framework for Evaluating Landscape Connectivity and Conservation Planning (2008, background): “In the network literature, these 2 features are sometimes referred to as network robustness (i.e., robustness to the spread of a deleterious mutation and to the fragmentation of the network as an increasing number of nodes are deleted) (Albert et al. 2000; Sole & Montoya 2001; Dunne et al. 2002).”
Characterization of topological keystone species: Local, global and “meso-scale” centralities in food webs (2007, methodology): “This has conducted to the acceptance of node degree as the most widely used index of positional importance in a food web (Solé and Montoya, 2001; Dunne et al., 2002a).”
Tolerance of pollination networks to species extinctions (2004, methodology): “In C&L the data were collected in various subalpine habitats at ca. 2500m elevation over 11years (Clements & Long 1923), whereas in R they were collected within ca. 10km of Carlinville, Illinois over 22years ( Robertson 1929 ).”
Complexity, system integration, and susceptibility to change: Biodiversity connection (2005, background): “Food webs show a signature of integration as demonstrated by the presence of highly connected nodes, particularly at higher trophic levels, which resemble other complex network topologies (Solé and Montoya, 2001).”
Evolution of networks (2001, background): “We present a number of models demonstrating the main features of evolving networks and discuss current approaches for their simulation and analytical study.”
Interaction strengths in food webs: issues and opportunities (2004, background): “In the extreme case, it may identify conditions under which unweighted link structure alone is a reliable predictor of community stability, population dynamics, and /or system responses to a perturbation (e.g. Albert et al. 2000; Sole & Montoya 2001; Dunne et al. 2002).”
Toward a network perspective of the study of resilience in social-ecological systems (2006, background): “…it has previously concentrated on networks of human social agents such as individuals or organizations (Agarwal 2000, Tompkins et al. 2002, Schneider et al. 2003) or ecological networks such as food webs (Lassig et al. 2001, Sole and Montoya 2001, Dunne et al. 2002, Garlaschelli et al. 2003).”
Universal resilience patterns in complex networks (2016, background): “Such mapping of equation (4) to the 1D equation (7) allows us to take advantage of the theoretical tools developed for low-dimensional systems and apply them to a broad range of complex systems.”
The small world of human language (2001, background): “These two conditions are taken as the standard definition of SW. SW graphs have been shown to be present in both social and biological networks (Jeong et al., 2000; Montoya & Solé, 2000; Solé & Montoya, 2000; Newman, 2000; Strogatz, 2001).”