Beyond species: why ecological interaction networks vary through space and time

By Timothée Poisot, Daniel B. Stouffer, Dominique Gravel. bioRxiv, 2014

450 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Community ecology is tasked with the considerable challenge of predicting the structure, and properties, of emerging ecosystems. It requires the ability to understand how and why species interact, as this will allow the development of mechanism-based predictive models, and as such to better characterize how ecological mechanisms act locally on the existence of interspecific interactions. Here we argue that the current conceptualization of species interaction networks is ill-suited for this task. Instead, we propose that future research must start to account for the intrinsic variability of species interactions, then scale up from here onto complex networks. This can be accomplished simply by recognizing that there exists intra-specific variability, in traits or properties related to the establishment of species interactions. By shifting the scale towards population-based processes, we show that this new approach will improve our predictive ability and mechanistic understanding of how species interact over large spatial or temporal scales.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73fe6567b678893faebf742f40ea2f1f2622e82e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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).”
Machine learning and deep learning—A review for ecologists (2022, unknown): “Small datasets are common in E&E because observations are often difficult to obtain (e.g. for ecological networks, see Maglianesi et al., 2014; Strydom et al., 2021 ); and because due to the change in ecological patterns across scales (Poisot et al., 2015), datasets are difficult to combine.”
Describe, understand and predict: why do we need networks in ecology? (2016, background): “…can infer from network data can only be as good as our understanding of the network itself; that is, our understanding of (i) which species are present (Jordano 2016b), (ii) the ways they interact (Nielsen & Bascompte 2007) and (iii) their local characteristics when observed (Poisot et al. 2015).”
Identifying Causes of Patterns in Ecological Networks: Opportunities and Limitations (2017, background): “…[e.g., how interactions 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,…”
Bringing Elton and Grinnell Together: a quantitative framework to represent the biogeography of ecological interaction networks (2016, methodology): “It is not clear, however, to what extent the turnover of network structure is driven by a systematic change in species composition or of pairwise interactions (Poisot et al., 2012, 2015b).”
Trait matching and phylogeny as predictors of predator–prey interactions involving ground beetles (2018, methodology): “2016b) and relative abundance (Poisot et al. 2015; Bartomeus et al. 2016), integrating foraging behavior may be more challenging.”
How to make more out of community data? A conceptual framework and its implementation as models and software. (2017, background): “However, the type and strength of ecological interactions may be context-dependent (e.g. Poisot et al. 2015).”
Analysing ecological networks of species interactions (2018, background): “A network of species–species interactions is the addition of interactions at the population level (Poisot et al., 2015), themselves being aggregates of interactions at the individual level (Dupont, Trøjelsgaard & Olesen, 2011; Melián et al.”
Co-occurrence is not evidence of ecological interactions. (2020, background): “From a modelling perspective, tools exist that can be used to assess relationships among species using abundance data and infer interactions (Faisal et al., 2010; Poisot et al., 2015; Popovic et al., 2019).”
Temporal variation in plant–pollinator networks from seasonal tropical environments: Higher specialization when resources are scarce (2018, background): “Despite a clear appreciation of the temporally dynamic nature of populations and communities (e.g. Chesson & Huntly, 1989; Clements, 1936; Cowles, 1899), interaction networks are often treated as temporally static entities (Poisot, Stouffer, & Gravel, 2015).”