Abstract
BackgroundNetworks of single interaction types, such as plant-pollinator mutualisms, are biodiversity’s “building blocks”. Yet, the structure of mutualistic and antagonistic networks differs, leaving no unified modeling framework across biodiversity’s component pieces.Methods/Principal FindingsWe use a one-dimensional “niche model” to predict antagonistic and mutualistic species interactions, finding that accuracy decreases with the size of the network. We show that properties of the modeled network structure closely approximate empirical properties even where individual interactions are poorly predicted. Further, some aspects of the structure of the niche space were consistently different between network classes.Conclusions/SignificanceThese novel results reveal fundamental differences between the ability to predict ecologically important features of the overall structure of a network and the ability to predict pair-wise species interactions.
Highlights
Ecological networks describe who interacts with whom in ecological communities [1]
Bipartite Probabilistic Niche Model We developed a simple extension of the probabilistic niche model [26,27] (PNM) for bipartite networks
Replicating Consumer-resource Interactions In Figure 3 we show that the probabilistic niche model consistently outperforms a random model in all but 18 of our 151 networks
Summary
Ecological networks describe who interacts with whom in ecological communities [1] Subsets of these networks where a single type of interaction is considered, such as mutualistic interactions between plants and their pollinators [2], or antagonistic interactions between parasites and their hosts [3], are considered to be the true ‘building blocks’ of biodiversity [2,3,4,5]. The structure of mutualistic and antagonistic networks differs, leaving no unified modeling framework across biodiversity’s component pieces
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