Identifying important species in meta‐communities

Abstract

Abstract With the ongoing biodiversity crisis, identifying which species are of particular importance to prevent the extinction of other species has become a pressing issue. However, most approaches to detect these important species are made at a local (i.e, community) level, without considering the potential effect of species dispersion in a landscape. As habitat fragmentation has important effects on biodiversity, we need methods to better assess how local and spatial processes interact to determine important species and therefore better inform conservation efforts. We present a modified PageRank algorithm to determine the importance of species in meta‐communities. Species importance is defined as the ability of species in the meta‐community to spread nutrients within two sets of networks: food webs that depict local trophic interactions and landscape networks representing the movement of species across different habitat patches. We show that dispersal and trophic links jointly determine the importance of the different species, both at the local scale (within habitat patches) and at larger scales (landscape). More precisely, we observed that (i) what is considered an important species changes between isolated communities and meta‐communities and (ii) the importance of a species in a meta‐community depends on the position of its habitat patch in the landscape network. The importance of a species is influenced by both intrinsic factors (dispersal capacity, trophic position) and extrinsic factors (position of the patch in the landscape network). Our results stress the need for a larger‐scale consideration of space in the identification of important species.