Modeling the building blocks of biodiversity

Networks of single interaction types, such as plant-pollinator mutualisms, are biodiversity's "building blocks". Yet, the structure of mutualistic and antagonistic networks differs, leaving no unified modeling framework across biodiversity's component pieces. We use a one-dimensi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2013-02, Vol.8 (2), p.e56277-e56277
Main Authors: Joppa, Lucas N, Williams, Rich
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biodiversity
Biology
Ecological effects
Ecosystems
Flowers & plants
Food chains
Mathematical models
Modelling
Models, Theoretical
Plant reproduction
Pollinators
Probability
Species Specificity
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Summary:Networks of single interaction types, such as plant-pollinator mutualisms, are biodiversity's "building blocks". Yet, the structure of mutualistic and antagonistic networks differs, leaving no unified modeling framework across biodiversity's component pieces. We use a one-dimensional "niche model" to predict antagonistic and mutualistic species interactions, finding that accuracy decreases with the size of the network. We show that properties of the modeled network structure closely approximate empirical properties even where individual interactions are poorly predicted. Further, some aspects of the structure of the niche space were consistently different between network classes. These novel results reveal fundamental differences between the ability to predict ecologically important features of the overall structure of a network and the ability to predict pair-wise species interactions.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0056277