Moving towards a comprehensive view of the spatial processes in seed dispersal networks: Embracing metacommunities.

Abstract

The current biodiversity crisis requires efficient approaches to address the ongoing impoverishment of natural communities and the depletion of ecosystem services and functions. In this sense, identifying key species that promote the functioning of ecological processes can be strategic to guide actions aiming at the conservation and restoration of biodiversity. Node-level metrics in interaction networks can be helpful to identify those key species, as they measure the role each species plays in organizing the interactions. Moreover, ecological correlates of species structural roles may vary between local and global networks of interactions, reflecting distinct mechanisms acting at different spatial scales. By studying local seed dispersal networks and one global meta-network combining those local networks, Moulatlet et al. identified the most important traits explaining bird species centrality at varying spatial scales. They found that body mass was the main trait explaining centrality at the local scale, whereas range size was the main predictor of species centrality at the global scale. In this contribution, besides assessing local interaction networks, Moulatlet et al. adopt a biogeographical perspective to seed dispersal systems, extending our knowledge about the possible mechanisms that underlie the organization of interacting assemblages when changing the spatial scale of observation. Future efforts on this field could include an intermediate scale, comprising the level of metacommunities, shedding light on the interplay between local and spatial processes, both embedded in biogeographical realms, when determining the organization of interactions and the ecological correlates of species roles.