The joint influence of competition and mutualism on the biodiversity of mutualistic ecosystems
TLDR
In this article, a multilayer network that naturally accounts for mutualism and competition is built up, and a dynamical population model and numerical simulations are used to show that there is an intricate relation between competition and mutualism.Abstract:
In the past years, there have been many advances –but also many debates– around mutualistic communities, whose structural features appear to facilitate mutually beneficial interactions and increase biodiversity, under some given population dynamics. However, most approaches neglect the structure of inter-species competition by adopting a mean-field perspective that does not deal with competitive interactions properly. Here, we build up a multilayer network that naturally accounts for mutualism and competition and show, through a dynamical population model and numerical simulations, that there is an intricate relation between competition and mutualism. Specifically, the multilayer structure is coupled to a dynamical model in which the intra-guild competitive terms are weighted by the abundance of shared mutualistic relations. We find that mutualism does not have the same consequences on the evolution of specialist and generalist species, and that there is a non-trivial profile of biodiversity in the parameter space of competition and mutualism. Our findings emphasize how the simultaneous consideration of positive and negative interactions derived from the real networks is key to understand the delicate trade-off between topology and biodiversity in ecosystems and call for the need to incorporate more realistic interaction patterns when modeling the structural and dynamical stability of mutualistic systems.read more
Citations
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Nestedness in complex networks: Observation, emergence, and implications
Manuel Sebastian Mariani,Manuel Sebastian Mariani,Zhuo-Ming Ren,Jordi Bascompte,Claudio J. Tessone +4 more
TL;DR: This review is the first comprehensive attempt to unify both streams of studies, usually disconnected from each other, on nestedness, and surveys results from variegated disciplines, including statistical physics, graph theory, ecology, and theoretical economics.
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Multiple interactions networks: towards more realistic descriptions of the web of life
TL;DR: It is suggested that three main frameworks are in use to investigate the properties of multiple interactions networks: ‘expanded food-webs’, ‘multilayer networks’ and ‘equal footing networks�’.
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Seeing the forest for the trees: Putting multilayer networks to work for community ecology
Matthew C. Hutchinson,Bernat Bramon Mora,Shai Pilosof,Allison K. Barner,Sonia Kéfi,Elisa Thébault,Pedro Jordano,Daniel B. Stouffer +7 more
TL;DR: The pay‐off for added investment will be ecological networks that describe the composition and capture the dynamics of ecological communities more completely and, consequently, have greater power for understanding the patterns and processes that underpin diversity in ecological communities.
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Breaking the Spell of Nestedness: The Entropic Origin of Nestedness in Mutualistic Systems
TL;DR: The nested configuration of mutually beneficial interactions among species in real ecosystems arises from the number of interactions of each species, a potentially useful insight for understanding the scale at which natural selection operates in those systems.
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A Critical Mutualism - Competition Interplay Underlies the Loss of Microbial Diversity in Sedentary Lifestyle.
Nazareth P. Castellanos,Gustavo G. Diez,Carmen Antúnez-Almagro,María Bailén,Carlo Bressa,Rocío González Soltero,Margarita Pérez,Mar Larrosa +7 more
TL;DR: This finding indicates that there is a critical point in this ratio beyond which the stability of the microbial community is lost, inducing a loss of diversity.
References
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