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Dispersal governs the reorganization of ecological networks under environmental change

An Author Correction to this article was published on 24 July 2023

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Abstract

Ecological networks, such as food webs, mutualist webs and host–parasite webs, are reorganizing as species abundances and spatial distributions shift in response to environmental change. Current theoretical expectations for how this reorganization will occur are available for competition or for parts of interaction networks, but these may not extend to more complex networks. Here we use metacommunity theory to develop new expectations for how complex networks will reorganize under environmental change, and show that dispersal is crucial for determining the degree to which networks will retain their composition and structure. When dispersal between habitat patches is low, all types of species interactions act as a strong determinant for whether species can colonize suitable habitats. This colonization resistance drives species turnover, which breaks apart current networks and leads to the formation of new networks. However, when dispersal rates are increased, colonists arrive in high abundance in habitats where they are well adapted, so interactions with resident species contribute less to colonization success. Dispersal ensures that species associations are maintained as they shift in space, so networks retain similar composition and structure. The crucial role of dispersal reinforces the need to manage habitat connectivity to sustain species and interaction diversity into the future.

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Figure 1: Reorganization of ecological networks over the range of dispersal rates (0.0005–0.1).
Figure 2: Mean network dissimilarity and interspecific variation in the rate at which species shift their distributions, across the range of dispersal rates.
Figure 3: Mean network dissimilarity from interaction gains and losses in the four community types and for the different interaction types in the food web communities.
Figure 4: The mean proportion of the network properties in each final species interaction network compared to its most compositionally similar pre-change network.
Figure 5: Heatmaps indicating change in link density through space and time in competitive, mixed, and food-web networks (rows) over the range of dispersal rates (0.0005–0.1; columns).

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. O’Connor, B. Beisner, G. Fussmann, E. Pedersen, A. Ives and members of the Gonzalez lab for assistance and valuable feedback. P.L.T. is supported by NSERC, Vineberg and Killam fellowships. A.G. is supported by the Canada Research Chair program, Killam Fellowship, the Liber Ero Chair in Conservation Biology and NSERC.

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P.L.T. and A.G. designed the study. P.L.T. wrote the code and performed the simulations. P.L.T. wrote the first draft of the manuscript and both authors contributed substantially to revisions.

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Correspondence to Patrick L. Thompson.

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Thompson, P., Gonzalez, A. Dispersal governs the reorganization of ecological networks under environmental change. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0162 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0162

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