The Interplay of Binary and Quantitative Structure on the Stability of Mutualistic Networks

Title
The Interplay of Binary and Quantitative Structure on the Stability of Mutualistic Networks
Publication Date
2024-09
Author(s)
Anderson, Christopher R
Curtsdotter, Alva R K
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6870-7924
Email: ikarlsso@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:ikarlsso
Staniczenko, Phillip P A
Valdovinos, Fernanda S
Brosi, Berry J
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Place of publication
United Kingdom
DOI
10.1093/icb/icae074
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/72397
Abstract

Synopsis Understanding how the structure of biological systems impacts their resilience (broadly defined) is a recurring question across multiple levels of biological organization. In ecology, considerable effort has been devoted to understanding how the structure of interactions between species in ecological networks is linked to different broad resilience outcomes, especially local stability. Still, nearly all of that work has focused on interaction structure in presence-absence terms and has not investigated quantitative structure, i.e., the arrangement of interaction strengths in ecological networks. We investigated how the interplay between binary and quantitative structure impacts stability in mutualistic interaction networks (those in which species interactions are mutually beneficial), using community matrix approaches. We additionally examined the effects of network complexity and within-guild competition for context. In terms of structure, we focused on understanding the stability impacts of nestedness, a structure in which more-specialized species interact with smaller subsets of the same species that more-generalized species interact with. Most mutualistic networks in nature display binary nestedness, which is puzzling because both binary and quantitative nestedness are known to be destabilizing on their own. We found that quantitative network structure has important consequences for local stability. In more-complex networks, binary-nested structures were the most stable configurations, depending on the quantitative structures, but which quantitative structure was stabilizing depended on network complexity and competitive context. As complexity increases and in the absence of within-guild competition, the most stable configurations have a nested binary structure with a complementary (i.e., anti-nested) quantitative structure. In the presence of within-guild competition, however, the most stable networks are those with a nested binary structure and a nested quantitative structure. In other words, the impact of interaction overlap on community persistence is dependent on the competitive context. These results help to explain the prevalence of binary-nested structures in nature and underscore the need for future empirical work on quantitative structure.

Link
Citation
Integrative And Comparative Biology, 64(3), p. 827-840
ISSN
1557-7023
1540-7063
Start page
827
End page
840

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