Ecological networks articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nutrient enrichment is a major global change component. Here the authors show that soil acidification induced by nutrient enrichment, rather than changes in mineral nutrient and carbon availability, modulates soil biodiversity-function relationships

    • Zhengkun Hu
    • , Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo
    •  & Manqiang Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Herbicides used in terrestrial environments pollute coastal ecosystems. Here, the authors analyse the presence of 32 herbicides at 661 bays and gulfs worldwide from 1990 to 2022, showing how under current herbicide stress, phytoplankton primary productivity was inhibited by more than 5% at 25%.

    • Liqiang Yang
    • , Xiaotong He
    •  & Yongyu Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study investigates the dynamic associations among microbes in the world’s tropical and subtropical oceans. It reveals that potential interactions vary with ocean depth and location, with most surface associations not persisting in deeper waters. The results contribute to understanding the ocean microbiome in the context of global change.

    • Ina M. Deutschmann
    • , Erwan Delage
    •  & Ramiro Logares

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Colonizer establishment produces fundamental building blocks that shape the structure of assembling pollination networks. In this model, while colonizers leverage indirect competition to establish, adaptive foraging by pollinators maintains species coexistence which produces nested networks.

    • Sabine Dritz
    • , Rebecca A. Nelson
    •  & Fernanda S. Valdovinos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soil microbial networks play a crucial role in plant community stability. This study shows that decoupled prokaryote and fungal networks in dry grassland soil support plant community stability over time, while coupled networks in abandoned agricultural soil are associated to instability.

    • Dina in ‘t Zandt
    • , Zuzana Kolaříková
    •  & Zuzana Münzbergová

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ant and honeybee workers specialize on certain tasks and also on zones within the nest; but how do they avoid straying into the wrong zone? The authors conduct automated tracking experiments following thousands of individuals, revealing that workers use context-dependent rules to navigate inside the nest.

    • Thomas O. Richardson
    • , Nathalie Stroeymeyt
    •  & Laurent Keller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    By using network motifs, a new view of the global hydrological cycle is offered. With them, it is revealed that the Amazon rainforest is a one-of-a-kind moisture recycling hub, which shows that the ecosystem may be subject to increased vulnerability

    • Nico Wunderling
    • , Frederik Wolf
    •  & Arie Staal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aquatic (blue) and terrestrial (green) food webs are part of the same landscape, but it remains unclear whether they respond similarly to shared environmental gradients. Using long-term monitoring data from Switzerland and a metaweb approach, this study reveals how inferred blue and green food webs exhibit different properties along an elevation gradient and among land-use types.

    • Hsi-Cheng Ho
    • , Jakob Brodersen
    •  & Florian Altermatt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ratio of predator-to-prey biomass is a key element in food webs. Here, the authors report a unified analysis of predator-prey biomass scaling in complex food webs, finding general patterns of sub-linear scaling across ecosystems and levels of organization.

    • Daniel M. Perkins
    • , Ian A. Hatton
    •  & Ulrich Brose

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Disentangling causal interactions among biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and environmental factors is key to understanding how ecosystems respond to changing environment. This study presents a global scale analysis quantifying causal interactions and feedbacks among phytoplankton diversity, biomass and nutrients along environmental gradients of aquatic ecosystems.

    • Chun-Wei Chang
    • , Takeshi Miki
    •  & Chih-hao Hsieh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Crop diversification could be important for food security. Here, using methods from network science, the authors find that a positive relationship between crop diversity and nutritional stability globally does not necessarily equate to improving nutritional stability in a given country.

    • Charlie C. Nicholson
    • , Benjamin F. Emery
    •  & Meredith T. Niles

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Habitat fragmentation and eutrophication have strong impacts on biodiversity but there is limited understanding of their cumulative impacts. This study presents simulations of meta-food-webs and provides a mechanistic explanation of how landscape heterogeneity promotes biodiversity through rescue and drainage effects.

    • Remo Ryser
    • , Myriam R. Hirt
    •  & Ulrich Brose

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A more comprehensive map of viral host ranges can help identify and mitigate zoonotic and animal-disease risks. A divide-and-conquer approach which separates viral, mammalian and network features predicts over 20,000 unknown associations between known viruses and susceptible mammalian species.

    • Maya Wardeh
    • , Marcus S. C. Blagrove
    •  & Matthew Baylis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Networks describe the intricate patterns of interaction occurring within ecological systems, but they are unfortunately difficult to construct from data. Here, the authors show how Bayesian statistical techniques can separate structure from noise in networks gathered in observational studies of plant-pollinator systems.

    • Jean-Gabriel Young
    • , Fernanda S. Valdovinos
    •  & M. E. J. Newman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fluctuations in ecosystems and other large dynamical systems are driven by intrinsic and extrinsic noise and contain hidden information which is difficult to extract. Here, the authors derive analytical characterizations of fluctuations in random interacting systems, allowing inference of network properties from time series data.

    • Yvonne Krumbeck
    • , Qian Yang
    •  & Tim Rogers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Homologous recombination between co-infecting coronaviruses can produce novel pathogens. Here, Wardeh et al. develop a machine learning approach to predict associations between mammals and multiple coronaviruses and hence estimate the potential for generation of novel coronaviruses by recombination.

    • Maya Wardeh
    • , Matthew Baylis
    •  & Marcus S. C. Blagrove

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Not all plants are equally able to support native insects. Here, the authors use data on interactions among >12,000 Lepidoptera species and >2000 plant genera across the United States, showing that few plant genera host the majority of Lepidoptera species; this information is used to suggest priorities for plant restoration.

    • Desiree L. Narango
    • , Douglas W. Tallamy
    •  & Kimberley J. Shropshire

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plant-pollinator interactions are not fixed but instead can change seasonally and across years. Here, the authors provide a holistic perspective on how plants and pollinators first enter, then comprise, and ultimately leave interaction networks over time.

    • Bernat Bramon Mora
    • , Eura Shin
    •  & Daniel B. Stouffer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Floral phenotypes impact interactions between plants and pollinators. Here, the authors show that Moricandia arvensis displays discrete seasonal plasticity in floral phenotype, with large, lilac flowers attracting long-tongued bees in spring and small, rounded, white flowers attracting generalist pollinators in summer.

    • José M. Gómez
    • , Francisco Perfectti
    •  & Rubén Torices

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors present a theoretical framework based on community ecology and network science to investigate the efficacy of fecal microbiota transplantation in conditions associated with a disrupted gut microbiota, using the recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection as a prototype disease.

    • Yandong Xiao
    • , Marco Tulio Angulo
    •  & Yang-Yu Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The dynamics of ecological communities depends on interactions between species as well as those between species and their environment, however the effects of the latter are poorly understood. Here, Yeakel et al. reveal how species that modify their environment (ecosystem engineers) impact community dynamics and the risk of extinction.

    • Justin D. Yeakel
    • , Mathias M. Pires
    •  & Thilo Gross

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mutualism is typically portrayed as a destabilizing process in community ecology. Here, via a random matrix model that considers species density, the author shows that mutualistic interactions can, in fact, enhance population density at equilibrium and increase community resilience to perturbation.

    • Lewi Stone

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is crucial yet challenging to identify cause-consequence relation in complex dynamical systems where direct causal links can mix with indirect ones. Leng et al. propose a data-driven model-independent method to distinguish direct from indirect causality and test its applicability to real-world data.

    • Siyang Leng
    • , Huanfei Ma
    •  & Luonan Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies have investigated macroecological patterns of host sharing among viruses, although certain mammal clades have not been represented in these analyses, and the findings have not been used to predict the true network. Here the authors model the species level traits that predict viral sharing across all mammal clades and validate their predictions using an independent dataset.

    • Gregory F. Albery
    • , Evan A. Eskew
    •  & Kevin J. Olival

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aside from their pollination function, pollinators consume and are consumed by other members of ecological communities; these relationships could explain the controversial effects of pollinators on ecological networks. Here the authors show that when mutualists such as pollinators are introduced into food webs, they increase ecosystem biodiversity, stability, and function.

    • Kayla R. S. Hale
    • , Fernanda S. Valdovinos
    •  & Neo D. Martinez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Species loss from ecological networks can impair network stability and ecosystem function. Here the authors simulate animal extinctions in interaction networks between plants and avian frugivores, showing that frugivore extinctions have comparatively weak effects on network structure, but strongly reduce seed-dispersal distance.

    • Isabel Donoso
    • , Marjorie C. Sorensen
    •  & Matthias Schleuning

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about how the speed of ecosystem collapse depends on ecosystem size. Here, Cooper, Willcock et al. analyse empirical data and models finding that although regime shift duration increases with ecosystem size, this relationship saturates and even large ecosystems can collapse in a few decades.

    • Gregory S. Cooper
    • , Simon Willcock
    •  & John A. Dearing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Increasingly, eDNA is being used to infer ecological interactions. Here the authors sample eDNA over 18 months in a marine environment and use co-occurrence network analyses to infer potential interactions among organisms from microbes to mammals, testing how they change over time in response to oceanographic factors.

    • Anni Djurhuus
    • , Collin J. Closek
    •  & Mya Breitbart

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Habitat loss could affect ecological communities in variable ways depending on its structure. Here, the authors show that contiguous rather than random loss is more damaging to the stability of multitrophic communities, regardless of the fraction of mutualistic interactions within the community.

    • Chris McWilliams
    • , Miguel Lurgi
    •  & Daniel Montoya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plant diversity affects ecosystem function in myriad ways, but the effect on food webs has received less investigation. Here, the authors use high-resolution food web data from a grassland diversity experiment to show that apparent and exploitative competition motifs increase with plant diversity.

    • Darren P. Giling
    • , Anne Ebeling
    •  & Jes Hines

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lurgi et al. analyse the distribution of microbial symbionts across many sponge species and reveal modules of non-random associations which are primarily driven by host features and microbial phylogenies, and less by the environment. Results also show that metabolic functions are distinct across modules.

    • Miguel Lurgi
    • , Torsten Thomas
    •  & Jose M. Montoya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Herbivorous insects could diversify through radiations after major host switches or through constant variability in new host use. With phylogenetic and network analyses, Braga et al. show that variability in host use supports most butterfly diversification, while rare radiations can further boost diversity.

    • Mariana P. Braga
    • , Paulo R. Guimarães Jr
    •  & Niklas Janz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A challenge for mutualists is that partner cue reliability is often low. Here, the authors show that though fruit brightness is weakly predictive of nutritional content, the diets of birds (e.g. migrants vs. residents) are structured by fruit brightness in alignment with expected nutritional needs.

    • Jörg Albrecht
    • , Jonas Hagge
    •  & Nina Farwig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Causality inference in time series analysis based on temporal precedence principle between cause and effect fails to detect mutual causal interactions. Here, Yang et al. introduce a causal decomposition approach based on the covariation principle of cause and effect that overcomes this limitation.

    • Albert C. Yang
    • , Chung-Kang Peng
    •  & Norden E. Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drought conditions can alter the composition of soil microbial communities, but the effects of drought on network properties have not been tested. Here, de Vries and colleagues show that co-occurrence networks are destabilised under drought for bacteria but not fungi.

    • Franciska T. de Vries
    • , Rob I. Griffiths
    •  & Richard D. Bardgett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Network stability is a central topic in theoretical ecology, with most work focusing on mutualistic or food web networks. Here, the authors explore the stability of microbial networks based on the consumption and exchange of resources, showing that asymmetry in crossfeeding relationships can destabilize networks.

    • Stacey Butler
    •  & James P. O’Dwyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The structure of ecological networks can vary dramatically, yet there may be common features across networks from different ecosystem types. Here, Bramon Mora et al. use network alignment to demonstrate that there is a common backbone of interactions underlying empirical food webs.

    • Bernat Bramon Mora
    • , Dominique Gravel
    •  & Daniel B. Stouffer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The role of adaptive foraging in the threat of invasive pollinators to plant-pollinator systems is difficult to characterise. Here, Valdavinos et al. use network modelling to show the importance of foraging efficiency, diet overlap, plant species visitation, and degree of specialism in native pollinators.

    • Fernanda S. Valdovinos
    • , Eric L. Berlow
    •  & Neo D. Martinez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Crab spiders can reduce pollination and thus have been suggested to select against the floral traits that attract them. Here, the authors instead find evidence of local adaptation of buckler mustard plants to increase attraction of crab spiders by emission of the floral volatile β-ocimene when infested by florivores.

    • Anina C. Knauer
    • , Moe Bakhtiari
    •  & Florian P. Schiestl

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