Related papers: Why Nestedness in Mutualistic Networks?

Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…

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…

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 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…

The robustness of an ecological network quantifies the resilience of the ecosystem it represents to species loss. It corresponds to the proportion of species that are disconnected from the rest of the network when extinctions occur…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

James et al. (2012) presented simulations that apparently falsify the analytical result by Bastolla et al. (2009), who showed that nested mutualistic interactions decrease interspecific competition and increase biodiversity in model…

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…

We study how the community structure of bipartite mutualistic networks changes in a dynamic context. First, we consider a real mutualistic network and introduce extinction events according to several scenarios. We model extinctions as node…

Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…

The discourse surrounding the structural organization of mutualistic interactions mostly revolves around modularity and nestedness. The former is known to enhance the stability of communities, while the latter is related to their…

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…

Uncovering structural properties of ecological networks is a crucial starting point of studying the system's stability in response to various types of perturbations. We analyze pollination and seed disposal networks, which are…

While interdependent systems have usually been associated with increased fragility, we show that strengthening the interdependence between dynamical processes on different networks can make them more robust. By coupling the dynamics of…

We study the phenomenon of multistability in mutualistic networks of plants and pollinators, where one desired state in which all species coexist competes with multiple states in which some species are gone extinct. In this setting, we…