Related papers: Breaking the spell of nestedness
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
The observed architecture of ecological and socio-economic networks differs significantly from that of random networks. From a network science standpoint, non-random structural patterns observed in real networks call for an explanation of…
Understanding the architectural subtleties of ecological networks, believed to confer them enhanced stability and robustness, is a subject of outmost relevance. Mutualistic interactions have been profusely studied and their corresponding…
We investigate the relationship between the nested organization of mutualistic systems and their robustness against the extinction of species. We establish that a nested pattern of contacts is the best possible one as far as robustness is…
Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…
Mutualistic networks have been shown to involve complex patterns of interactions among animal and plant species. The architecture of these webs seems to pervade some of their robust and fragile behaviour. Recent work indicates that there is…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop several theoretical tools to measure that effect and we use them to…
Nestedness characterizes the linkage pattern of networked systems, indicating the likelihood that a node is linked to the nodes linked to the nodes with larger degrees than it. Networks of mutualistic relationship between distinct groups of…
We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop a dynamical model geared to establish the role of such proximity in…
In this work we present a dynamical model that succesfully describes the organization of mutualistic ecological systems. The main characteristic of these systems is the nested structure of the bipartite adjacency matrix describing their…
Nestedness is a common property of communication, finance, trade, and ecological networks. In networks with high levels of nestedness, the link positions of low-degree nodes (those with few links) form nested subsets of the link positions…
The architecture of bipartite networks linking two classes of constituents is affected by the interactions within each class. For the bipartite networks representing the mutualistic relationship between pollinating animals and plants, it…
Nested structure, which is non-random, controls cooperation dynamics and biodiversity in plant-animal mutualistic networks. This structural pattern has been explained in a static (non-growth) network models. However, evolutionary processes…
The foundational concepts behind the persistence of ecological communities have been based on two ecological properties: dynamical stability and feasibility. The former is typically regarded as the capacity of a community to return to an…
Nestedness is a property of bipartite complex networks that has been shown to characterize the peculiar structure of biological and economical networks. In a nested network, a node of low degree has its neighborhood included in the…
Interactions are ubiquitous across biological systems. These interactions can be abstracted as patterns of connections among distinct units such as genes, proteins, individual organisms, or species which form a hierarchy of biological…
This study investigates the prevalence and implications of nestedness within primate social networks, examining its relationship with cognitive and structural factors. We analysed data from 51 primate groups across 21 species, employing…
It has been observed that mutualistic bipartite networks have a nested structure of interactions. In addition, the degree distributions associated with the two guilds involved in such networks (e.g. plants & pollinators or plants & seed…
Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…