Co-occurrence is not evidence of ecological interactions.

By F. Guillaume Blanchet, Kevin Cazelles, Dominique Gravel. Ecology Letters, 2020

685 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is a rich amount of information in co-occurrence (presence-absence) data that could be used to understand community assembly. This proposition first envisioned by Forbes (1907) and then Diamond (1975) prompted the development of numerous modelling approaches (e.g. null model analysis, co-occurrence networks and, more recently, joint species distribution models). Both theory and experimental evidence support the idea that ecological interactions may affect co-occurrence, but it remains unclear to what extent the signal of interaction can be captured in observational data. It is now time to step back from the statistical developments and critically assess whether co-occurrence data are really a proxy for ecological interactions. In this paper, we present a series of arguments based on probability, sampling, food web and coexistence theories supporting that significant spatial associations between species (or lack thereof) is a poor proxy for ecological interactions. We discuss appropriate interpretations of co-occurrence, along with potential avenues to extract as much information as possible from such data.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dccc9cdaff5ee6f6c16765fbdfe8a823a18efdb0

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In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Defining and evaluating predictions of joint species distribution models (2020, background): “To our knowledge, no JSDM studies have yet included conditional or conditional marginal predictions, although they have been identified as desirable avenues of research (Blanchet et al., 2020; Norberg et al., 2019; Zurell et al., 2019).”
Processes in submerged soils – linking redox potential, soil organic matter turnover and plants to nutrient cycling (2021, background): “But both strengths and limitations of network analysis need to be taken into account to ensure correct interpretation (Cougoul et al. 2019; Blanchet et al. 2020).”