Journal
OIKOS
Volume 118, Issue 1, Pages 122-130Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2008.16751.x
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Funding
- Postdoctoral and a Sabatical Fellowship
- National Science Foundation [DEB-0553768]
- Univ. of California at Santa Barbara
- Santa Barbara campus
- Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences [IAA100070601]
- Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology [REN200304774, REN2003-00273]
- European Heads of Research Councils
- European Science Foundation
- EC Sixth Framework Programme through a EURYI (European Young Investigator) award
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Most studies on ecological networks consider only a single interaction type (e.g. competitive, predatory or mutualistic), and try to developrules for system stability based exclusively on properties of this interaction type. However, the stability of ecological networks may be more dependent on the way different interaction types are combined in real communities. To address this issue, we start by compiling an ecological network in the Donana Biological Reserve, southern Spain, with 390 species and 798 mu-tualistic and antagonistic interactions. We characterize network structure by looking at how mutualistic and antagonistic interactions are combined across all plant species. Both the ratio of mutualistic to antagonistic interactions per plant, and the number of basic modules with an antagonistic and a mutualistic interaction are very heterogeneous across plant species, with a few plant species showing very high values for these parameters. To assess the implications of these network patterns on species diversity, we study analytically and by simulation a model of this ecological network. We find that the observed correlation between strong interaction strengths and high mutualistic to antagonistic ratios in a few plant species significantly increases community diversity. Thus, to predict the persistence of biodiversity we need to understand how interaction strength and the architecture of ecological networks with different interaction types are combined.
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