Cavity-nesting community webs as predictive tools: where do we go from here?

Abstract

The complexities of ecological systems are often portrayed visually through the use of networks, and a number of techniques have been developed to quantify network properties in useful ways. Cavity-nesting communities may be particularly well suited for network analysis because these communities are hierarchically structured and interconnected. In addition, the mechanisms of cavity excavation and use, which mediate interactions between cavity-nesting species, are relatively clear and experimentally testable through cavity manipulation. Webs have recently been used as a visual tool to depict the structure of cavity-nesting communities. Here, we present a conceptual paper that explores future directions of nest web analysis. We provide a simple demonstration of how web visualization of cavity-nesting communities can enable the prediction of how community structure will shift when components are removed and identify non-intuitive indirect interactions within an ecological community. We also provide a brief review of some network tools used to examine ecological complexity. We hope this exercise can stimulate discussion of how nest web analysis can be advanced, for example by developing quantitative methods to describe and compare webs across different forest systems and by integrating population dynamics into nest webs to examine community-level stability. Such expansions of nest web analysis can contribute to the development of predictive capabilities for community response to environmental change and forest management.