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Core-periphery structure in mutualistic networks: an epitaph for nestedness?

View ORCID ProfileAna M. Martín González, View ORCID ProfileDiego P. Vázquez, View ORCID ProfileRodrigo Ramos-Jiliberto, View ORCID ProfileSang Hoon Lee, Vincent Miele
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.02.021691
Ana M. Martín González
1Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab, Berkeley, CA, USA
2Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
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  • For correspondence: ana.maria.martingonzalez@gmail.com
Diego P. Vázquez
3Argentine Institute for Dryland Research, CONICET, CC 507, 5500 Mendoza, Argentina
4Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, National University of Cuyo, Padre Jorge Contreras 1300, M5502JMA Mendoza, Argentina
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Rodrigo Ramos-Jiliberto
5GEMA Center for Genomics, Ecology & Environment, Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies, Universidad Mayor, Camino La Pirámide 5750 Huechuraba, Santiago, Chile
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Sang Hoon Lee
6Department of Liberal Arts, Gyeongnam National University of Science and Technology, Jinju, Korea
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Vincent Miele
7Université de Lyon; Université Lyon 1; CNRS, UMR5558, Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive, F-69622 Villeurbanne, France
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ABSTRACT

The calculation of nestedness has become a routine analysis in the study of ecological networks, as it is commonly associated with community resilience, robustness and species persistence. While meaningful in species distributional patterns, for an interaction matrix to be nested, specialist species must interact with ordered subsets of subsequently more generalized species — not just with a lower number of species. However, after reviewing 419 papers on mutualistic networks published since nestedness was introduced for the study of species interactions in 2003, we have found that only two theoretical studies considered explicitly ordered subsets. Instead, most studies interpret nestedness as a core of densely connected generalist species, surrounded by a periphery of specialist species attached to this core — a so-called core-periphery structure. Such a topological feature is generally perceived as a core-periphery structure in network science. Here, we argue that the concept of core-periphery may be more relevant for studies on mutualistic networks than the concept of nestedness, as ecologists are usually not interested in exploring in detail the ordered subsets that characterize nestedness but instead use nestedness to describe a topology with a core of densely linked generalist species surrounded by a sparsely linked periphery of specialists. To illustrate our arguments and the quantification of core-periphery structures, we calculate core-periphery and nestedness in a large publicly available dataset of mutualistic networks. We also describe the calculation of core-periphery structures, its relationship with nestedness, and provide the code inside the R package econetwork for its calculation in mutualistic networks. We hope that our review will help ecologists to move beyond nestedness towards a more explicit representation of the structure of ecological networks.

Footnotes

  • ana.maria.martingonzalez{at}gmail.com, dvazquez{at}mendoza-conicet.gob.ar, rodrigo.ramos{at}umayor.cl, lshlj82{at}gntech.ac.kr, vincent.miele{at}univ-lyon1.fr

  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b54MrwO7QbeFQcK9CA-sgDkq0F57cgLb4WpX6_y8Y-Y/edit#gid=0

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 03, 2020.
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Core-periphery structure in mutualistic networks: an epitaph for nestedness?
Ana M. Martín González, Diego P. Vázquez, Rodrigo Ramos-Jiliberto, Sang Hoon Lee, Vincent Miele
bioRxiv 2020.04.02.021691; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.02.021691
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Core-periphery structure in mutualistic networks: an epitaph for nestedness?
Ana M. Martín González, Diego P. Vázquez, Rodrigo Ramos-Jiliberto, Sang Hoon Lee, Vincent Miele
bioRxiv 2020.04.02.021691; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.02.021691

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