Asymmetric Coevolutionary Networks Facilitate Biodiversity Maintenance

By Jordi Bascompte, Pedro Jordano, J. Olesen. Science, 2006

1,197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The mutualistic interactions between plants and their pollinators or seed dispersers have played a major role in the maintenance of Earth's biodiversity. To investigate how coevolutionary interactions are shaped within species-rich communities, we characterized the architecture of an array of quantitative, mutualistic networks spanning a broad geographic range. These coevolutionary networks are highly asymmetric, so that if a plant species depends strongly on an animal species, the animal depends weakly on the plant. By using a simple dynamical model, we showed that asymmetries inherent in coevolutionary networks may enhance long-term coexistence and facilitate biodiversity maintenance.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e150bc5856d446d2f8633d31ad65eea9847d0c67

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Citations in the corpus

Massively Introduced Managed Species and Their Consequences for Plant–Pollinator Interactions (2017, background): “Facilitative effects might also arise from asymmetry in plant–pollinator interactions: if a MIMS pollinator efficiently pollinates plant species upon which wild pollinators are dependent (Bascompte et al., 2006; Vázquez and Aizen, 2004).”
Weed-insect pollinator networks as bio-indicators of ecological sustainability in agriculture. A review (2016, background): “Species are characterized by their degree, that is the number of links with other species (Jordano et al. 2003; Bascompte et al. 2006).”
On nestedness in ecological networks (2010, background): “We (Joppa et al., 2009), and others (Vazquez and Aizen, 2003, 2004; Bascompte et al., 2006), show elsewhere that reciprocal specialization is statistically very rare in the networks examined here.”
The Structure of Ecological Networks Across Levels of Organization (2020, background): “…be described by distributions of node-level metrics, such as the degree distribution ( Jordano et al. 2003), distributions of interaction strengths (Bascompte et al. 2006), multiple forms of asymmetries (Rooney et al. 2006, Vázquez & Aizen 2004), motifs (Baiser et al. 2016), and graph spectra…”
The Robustness and Restoration of a Network of Ecological Networks (2012, background): “The relationship of robustness with 106 generalization is likely to be explained through the nestedness that is characteristic of many 107 ecological networks, and which confers robustness to networks (24, 25).”
Defining invasiveness and invasibility in ecological networks (2016, background): “…trophic (food web) and antagonistic (predator–prey and host-parasite/pathogen ) networks (e.g. Memmott et al. 2004; Eklöf and Ebenman 2006; Bascompte et al. 2006; Burgos et al. 2007; Estrada 2007; Bastola et al. 2009; Kiers et al. 2010; Thébault and Fontaine 2010; Brose 2011; de Visser…”
Ecological networks, nestedness and sampling effort (2007, background): “The cells within the matrix are used to indicate whether there is an interaction between the plant and the animal species that intersect in the matrix cell (Bascompte et al . 2003) (Fig. 1). Recent work has described the structure of both plant-pollinator and other types of mutualistic networks ( Ba”
The multilayer nature of ecological networks (2015, background): “rk Ecology Ecologists use networks to explore a multitude of ecological and evolutionary processes|including community structure and robustness [1], trophic interactions [2], patterns of co-evolution [3], genetic variation [4], and disease dynamics [5]. In an ecological network, nodes can represent ”
Megagardeners of the forest - the role of elephants in seed dispersal (2011, background): “Among seed dispersal mutualisms, generalism seems to be the rule (e.g. Bascompte et al., 2006) and obligate relationships are rare in nature.”