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Ecology

Abundant equals nested

Nature volume 500, pages 411–412 (2013)Cite this article

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How ecological network structures are influenced by species coexistence, community stability and perturbations is a topic of debate. It seems that one overlooked correlate of nested structures is species abundances. See Letter p.449

Understanding the mechanisms that shape biodiversity is one of the main goals of ecology. Network approaches, which integrate species and the interactions among them into a single framework, have proved enlightening, revealing distinct 'architectural' patterns that are strongly associated with particular ecological interactions. For mutualistic networks — those in which the interactions benefit both partners, such as between a plant and its pollinator, or a fish and a cleaner fish — the pervasive pattern seems to be a nested one, whereby specialist species (which have few partners) interact with a subset of the many partners of more generalist species. The origin and implications of nestedness remain strongly debated. On page 449 of this issue, Suweis et al.1 bring an innovative and intriguing contribution to this topic by demonstrating strong relationships among species abundances, nested architecture and community stability.

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Figure 1: A nested network.

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  1. Colin Fontaine is a CNRS researcher at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, UMR7204 CESCO, France.,

    Colin Fontaine

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  1. Colin Fontaine
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Correspondence to Colin Fontaine.

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Fontaine, C. Abundant equals nested. Nature 500, 411–412 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/500411a

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