Ecological networks articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conversion of rainforest to plantations in Sumatra leads to higher energetic losses in animal food webs aboveground than belowground, with the belowground energy being reallocated from diverse arthropod communities to invasive earthworms.

    • Anton M. Potapov
    • , Jochen Drescher
    •  & Stefan Scheu

  • Article |

    A numerical analysis of mutualistic interactions between species shows that indirect effects from species they do not interact with directly are the biggest source of variation and cause the largest decreases to species fitness.

    • Leandro G. Cosmo
    • , Ana Paula A. Assis
    •  & Paulo R. Guimarães Jr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A large-scale metagenomic analysis of plant and mammal environmental DNA reveals complex ecological changes across the circumpolar region over the past 50,000 years, as biota responded to changing climates, culminating in the postglacial extinction of large mammals and emergence of modern ecosystems.

    • Yucheng Wang
    • , Mikkel Winther Pedersen
    •  & Eske Willerslev

  • Article |

    Interactions between European bird and plant species show that fruiting period has a major effect on seed dispersal by migrating birds, which will influence plant adaptations to climate change through latitudinal dispersal.

    • Juan P. González-Varo
    • , Beatriz Rumeu
    •  & Anna Traveset

  • Letter |

    An approach to ecological interactions that integrates coevolutionary dynamics and network structure, showing that selection in mutualisms is shaped not only by the mutualistic partners but by all sorts of indirect effects from other species in the network.

    • Paulo R. Guimarães Jr
    • , Mathias M. Pires
    •  & John N. Thompson

  • Letter |

    The pollination service provided by nocturnal flower visitors is disrupted near streetlamps, which leads to a reduced reproductive output of the plant that cannot be compensated for by day-time pollinators; in addition, the structure of combined nocturnal and diurnal pollination networks facilitates the spread of the consequences of disrupted night-time pollination to daytime pollinators.

    • Eva Knop
    • , Leana Zoller
    •  & Colin Fontaine

  • Letter |

    Removal of invasive exotic shrubs from mountaintop communities increased the number of pollinators and positively altered pollinator behaviour, which enhanced native fruit production, indicating that the degradation of ecosystem functions is partly reversible.

    • Christopher N. Kaiser-Bunbury
    • , James Mougal
    •  & Nico Blüthgen

  • Article |

    Plankton communities in the top 150 m of the nutrient-depleted, oligotrophic global ocean that are most associated with carbon export include unexpected taxa, such as Radiolaria, alveolate parasites, and Synechococcus and their phages, and point towards potential functional markers predicting a significant fraction of the variability in carbon export in these regions.

    • Lionel Guidi
    • , Samuel Chaffron
    •  & Gabriel Gorsky

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Alex James
    • , Jonathan W. Pitchford
    •  & Michael J. Plank

  • Letter |

    Cooperation among species tends to result in mutualistic networks with a nested structure, which is thought to increase biodiversity and persistence but may be less stable than unstructured networks: here nested networks are shown to result from a mechanism that maximizes species abundances in mutualistic communities, and the abundance of nested species is found to be directly linked to the resilience of the community.

    • Samir Suweis
    • , Filippo Simini
    •  & Amos Maritan

  • Letter |

    A modelling study of the mechanisms of extinction within ecological networks reveals how even a small reduction in the population size of a species may lead to the loss of its ecological functionality—that is, to its functional extinction—by causing extinction of other organisms in the food web, often only indirectly connected to the focal species, revealing the value of conservation strategies that target a broader ecological network.

    • Torbjörn Säterberg
    • , Stefan Sellman
    •  & Bo Ebenman

  • Editorial |

    The launch of an ecological monitoring network is good news at a difficult time.

  • News |

    Ambitious project to systematically monitor the environment on a continental scale is finally ready to break ground.

    • Jeff Tollefson

  • News & Views |

    The use of catch data to determine indicators of biodiversity such as 'mean trophic level' does not adequately measure ecosystem changes induced by fishing. Improved ways to assess those changes are required. See Letter p.431

    • Joseph E. Powers

  • Letter |

    It is expected that closely related organisms are more likely to show similar ecological interactions than less related ones. But this has been tested only for certain types of interaction, and in a restricted set of taxa. Now interaction networks have been constructed for 116 different clades of related organisms, across the entire tree of life, and including all types of interaction. The results reveal significant conservatism across the board, including both specialist and generalist species.

    • José M. Gómez
    • , Miguel Verdú
    •  & Francisco Perfectti

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