In: Journal of Animal Ecology, 2019, vol. 88, no. 5, p. 808–809
Song, Rohr, and Saavedra (2017) have proposed a methodology to compare network properties across systems with different sizes and constraints, in response to the fact that z‐scores cannot be used for such purposes. Simmons, Hoeppke, and Sutherland (2019) have shown that part of the methodology can be improved. Here, we show that all previous results hold and are strengthened by the new...
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In: Biological Reviews, 2018, vol. 93, no. 2, p. 785–800
Knowledge of species composition and their interactions, in the form of interaction networks, is required to understand processes shaping their distribution over time and space. As such, comparing ecological networks along environmental gradients represents a promising new research avenue to understand the organization of life. Variation in the position and intensity of links within networks...
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In: Journal of Ecology, 2020, p. 1365-2745.13349
A major challenge in ecological research is to identify the tolerance of ecological communities to external perturbations. Modern coexistence theory (MCT) has been widely adopted as a framework to investigate the tolerance to perturbations in relative reductions of per capita growth rates, often using metrics that explicitly eliminate the independent role of intrinsic growth rates. More...
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In: Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2018, vol. 450, p. 30–36
The feasibility domain of an ecological community can be described by the set of environmental abiotic and biotic conditions under which all co-occurring and interacting species in a given site and time can have positive abundances. Mathematically, the feasibility domain corresponds to the parameter space compatible with positive (feasible) solutions at equilibrium for all the state variables...
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In: Ecology and Evolution, 2016, p. -
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 original equilibrium state after a perturbation in species abundances and is usually linked to the strength of interspecific interactions. The latter is the...
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In: Journal of Animal Ecology, 2017, vol. 86, no. 5, p. 1136–1146
Ecological interaction networks constantly reorganize as interspecific interactions change across successional stages and environmental gradients. This reorganization can also be associated with the extent to which species change their preference for types of niches available in their local sites. Despite the pervasiveness of these interaction changes, previous studies have revealed that...
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In: Ecology, 2015, p. -
Many of the observed species interactions embedded in ecological communities are not permanent, but are characterized by temporal changes that are observed along with abiotic and biotic variations. While work has been done describing and quantifying these changes, little is known about their consequences for species coexistence. Here, we investigate the extent to which changes of species...
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In: Ecological Monographs, 2017, p. -
Although observations of species-rich communities have long served as a primary motivation for research on the coexistence of competitors, the majority of our empirical and theoretical understanding comes from two-species systems. How much of the coexistence observed in species rich communities results from indirect effects among competitors that only emerge in diverse systems remains poorly...
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In: Science, 2014, vol. 345, no. 6195, p. 1253497
In theoretical ecology, traditional studies based on dynamical stability and numerical simulations have not found a unified answer to the effect of network architecture on community persistence. Here, we introduce a mathematical framework based on the concept of structural stability to explain such a disparity of results. We investigated the range of conditions necessary for the stable...
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In: Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2020, vol. 35, no. 5, p. 384–396
Observational and experimental studies have shown that an interaction class between two species (be it mutualistic, competitive, antagonistic, or neutral) may switch to a different class, depending on the biotic and abiotic factors within which species are observed. This complexity arising from the evidence of context-dependencies has underscored a difficulty in establishing a systematic ...
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