Journal
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 8, Issue 14, Pages 6852-6859Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.4252
Keywords
community structure; dynamics; environment; feasibility; persistence
Categories
Funding
- MIT Research Committee Funds
- Mitsui Chair
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A major quest in network and community ecology has been centered on understanding the importance of structural patterns in species interaction networksthe synthesis of who interacts with whom in a given location and time. In the past decades, much effort has been devoted to infer the importance of a particular structure by its capacity to tolerate an external perturbation on its structure or dynamics. Here, we demonstrate that such a perspective leads to inconsistent conclusions. That is, the importance of a network structure changes as a function of the external perturbations acting on a community at any given point in time. Thus, we discuss a research agenda to investigate the relative importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment-dependent framework. We hypothesize that only by studying systematically the link between network structure and community dynamics under an environment-dependent framework, we can uncover the limits at which communities can tolerate environmental changes.
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