Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance

By Jennifer A. Dunne, Richard J. Williams, Neo D. Martinez. Ecology Letters, 2002

1,700 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Food-web structure mediates dramatic effects of biodiversity loss including secondary and ‘cascading’ extinctions. We studied these effects by simulating primary species loss in 16 food webs from terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and measuring robustness in terms of the secondary extinctions that followed. As observed in other networks, food webs are more robust to random removal of species than to selective removal of species with the most trophic links to other species. More surprisingly, robustness increases with food-web connectance but appears independent of species richness and omnivory. In particular, food webs experience ‘rivet-like’ thresholds past which they display extreme sensitivity to removal of highly connected species. Higher connectance delays the onset of this threshold. Removing species with few trophic connections generally has little effect though there are several striking exceptions. These findings emphasize how the number of species removed affects ecosystems differently depending on the trophic functions of species removed.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ddcac53df3c960b137d1786a94b67b789f5b9aee

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Citations in the corpus

Invariant properties in coevolutionary networks of plant-animal interactions (2002, background): “Broad-scaling suggest that, compared to abiotic networks with scale-free behaviour, these networks are very robust to the loss of keystone, highly connected nodes (species) which are the backbone of the interactions (see also Dunne et al. 2002a ).”
How to monitor ecological communities cost-efficiently: The example of plant–pollinator networks (2010, background): “Most studies find that higher values of these descriptors indicate higher robustness to perturbations (Dunne et al., 2002b; Memmott et al., 2004).”
Development of inland lakes as hubs in an invasion network (2005, background): “However, scale-free networks such as protein interactions (Jeong et al. 2001), the Internet (Albert, Jeong & Barabasi 2000), and some food webs ( Dunne, Williams & Martinez 2002 ) are highly susceptible to attacks directed against the nodes with highest connectance.”
Species loss and the structure and functioning of multitrophic aquatic systems (2004, methodology): “Future models could simulate extinctions that correspond to generalism (e.g. connectedness, as in Dunne et al. 2002), interaction strength, vulnerability to predation, and competitive ability (though note that any cascading extinctions must have resulted from these kinds of difference among…”
Measuring specialization in species interaction networks (2006, methodology): “Entire network analyses are also used to study patterns on a community level such as coevolutionary adaptations [3], ecosystem stability or resilience [ 11- 14 ].”
The restoration of ecological interactions: plant-pollinator networks on ancient and restored heathlands (2007, methodology): “Using the method of Dunne et al. (2002) and removing the most connected plants and pollinators first from the network (most to least in Fig. 4a) led to a rapid collapse of both ancient and restored heathlands: once about 20% of species were removed in primary extinctions, a cascade of secondary exti”
Insights into the resistance and resilience of the soil microbial community. (2013, background): “Early theory paradoxally predicted that more complex network are likely to be less stable (May, 1974), the loss of one species following disturbance leading more easily to secondary extinction in highly connected networks (Solé & Montoya, 2001; Dunne et al., 2002).”
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).”
Centrality measures and the importance of generalist species in pollination networks (2010, background): “species with a high generalization level) have on average shorter distances to the rest of the nodes in the network, as shown in several ecological and non-ecological studies (Dunne et al., 2002; Goh et al., 2002; Guimerà and Amaral, 2004; Hahn and Kerns, 2004; Memmott et al., 2004; Jordán et al., 2”
Tolerance of pollination networks to species extinctions (2004, methodology): “The first approach is the same as that first used by Dunne et al. (2002) , and here simulates a probable extinction sequence, because specialist pollinators, which also tend to be the rarest species (e.g.”