Abstract
A major quest in network and community ecology has been centered on understanding the importance of structural patterns in species interaction networks—the synthesis of who interacts with whom in a given location and time. In the past decades, much effort has been devoted to infer the importance of a particular structure by its capacity to tolerate an external perturbation on its structure or dynamics. Here, we demonstrate that such a perspective leads to inconsistent conclusions. That is, the importance of a network structure changes as a function of the external perturbations acting on a community at any given point in time. Thus, we discuss a research agenda to investigate the relative importance of the structure of ecological networks under an environment‐dependent framework. We hypothesize that only by studying systematically the link between network structure and community dynamics under an environment‐dependent framework, we can uncover the limits at which communities can tolerate environmental changes.
Highlights
Since the beginnings of modern network theory (Newman, 2003, 2010), studies have assessed the importance of particular network structures by their capacity to tolerate an external perturbation acting on their structure or dynamics
To illustrate how naive simulations of external perturbations can lead to inconsistent conclusions about links between network structure and community persistence, we follow a structural stability approach (Rohr et al, 2014; Thom, 1972)
This approach is useful for our purposes as it allows us to focus on how the qualitative behavior of a dynamical system changes as a function of the parameters of the system itself
Summary
Since the beginnings of modern network theory (Newman, 2003, 2010), studies have assessed the importance of particular network structures (e.g., exponential or scale-free networks) by their capacity to tolerate an external perturbation acting on their structure or dynamics (e.g., a random or targeted sequential removal of nodes, Albert, Jeong, & Barabási, 2000). The importance of a network structure depends on the external perturbations faced by a community at any given point in time (Cadotte & Tucker, 2017; Coulson et al, 2017; Song, Rohr, & Saavedra, 2017). To investigate the tolerance of an ecological network to external perturbations, studies have been linking the structure of interaction networks with community persistence.
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