Identifying a common backbone of interactions underlying food webs from different ecosystems

Bernat Bramon Mora, Dominique Gravel, Luis J. Gilarranz, Timothée Poisot and Daniel B. Stouffer ()
Additional contact information
Bernat Bramon Mora: University of Canterbury
Dominique Gravel: McGill University
Luis J. Gilarranz: University of Zurich
Timothée Poisot: McGill University
Daniel B. Stouffer: University of Canterbury

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Although the structure of empirical food webs can differ between ecosystems, there is growing evidence of multiple ways in which they also exhibit common topological properties. To reconcile these contrasting observations, we postulate the existence of a backbone of interactions underlying all ecological networks—a common substructure within every network comprised of species playing similar ecological roles—and a periphery of species whose idiosyncrasies help explain the differences between networks. To test this conjecture, we introduce a new approach to investigate the structural similarity of 411 food webs from multiple environments and biomes. We first find significant differences in the way species in different ecosystems interact with each other. Despite these differences, we then show that there is compelling evidence of a common backbone of interactions underpinning all food webs. We expect that identifying a backbone of interactions will shed light on the rules driving assembly of different ecological communities.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05056-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-05056-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05056-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().