期刊
JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY
卷 249, 期 2, 页码 181-189出版社
ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2007.08.004
关键词
complex networks; forbidden links; mutualisms; plant-animal interactions; pollination; seed dispersal; small networks; species richness
The frequency distribution of the number of interactions per species (i.e., degree distribution) within plant-animal mutualistic assemblages often decays as a power-law with an exponential truncation. Such a truncation suggests that there are ecological factors limiting the frequency of supergeneralist species. However, it is not clear whether these patterns can emerge from intrinsic features of the interacting assemblages, such as differences between plant and animal species richness (richness ratio). Here, we show that high richness ratios often characterize plant-animal mutualisms. Then, we demonstrate that exponential truncations are expected in bipartite networks generated by a simple model that incorporates build-up mechanisms that lead to a high richness ratio. Our results provide a simple interpretation for the truncations commonly observed in the degree distributions of mutualistic networks that complements previous ones based on biological effects. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据