| 1. |
- Dee, Laura E., et al.
(författare)
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Operationalizing Network Theory for Ecosystem Service Assessments
- 2017
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Ingår i: Trends in Ecology & Evolution. - : ELSEVIER SCIENCE LONDON. - 0169-5347 .- 1872-8383. ; 32:2, s. 118-130
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Managing ecosystems to provide ecosystem services in the face of global change is a pressing challenge for policy and science. Predicting how alternative management actions and changing future conditions will alter services is complicated by interactions among components in ecological and socioeconomic systems. Failure to understand those interactions can lead to detrimental outcomes from management decisions. Network theory that integrates ecological and socioeconomic systems may provide a path to meeting this challenge. While network theory offers promising approaches to examine ecosystem services, few studies have identified how to operationalize networks for managing and assessing diverse ecosystem services. We propose a framework for how to use networks to assess how drivers and management actions will directly and indirectly alter ecosystem services.
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| 2. |
- Eklöf, Anna, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Networks, Ecological
- 2012. - 1
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Ingår i: Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology. - : University of California Press. - 9780520269651 - 9780520951785 ; , s. 470-478
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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| 3. |
- Eklöf, Anna, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Relevance of evolutionary history for food web structure
- 2012
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences. - : The Royal Society Publishing. - 0962-8452 .- 1471-2954. ; 279:1733, s. 1588-1596
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Explaining the structure of ecosystems is one of the great challenges of ecology. Simple models for foodweb structure aim at disentangling the complexity of ecological interaction networks and detect the main forces that are responsible for their shape. Trophic interactions are influenced by species traits, which in turn are largely determined by evolutionary history. Closely related species are more likely to share similar traits, such as body size, feeding mode and habitat preference than distant ones. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analysing whether evolutionary history—represented by taxonomic classification—provides valuable information on food web structure. In doing so, we measure which taxonomic ranks better explain species interactions. Our analysis is based on partitioning of the species into taxonomic units. For each partition, we compute the likelihood that a probabilistic model for food web structurere produces the data using this information. We find that taxonomic partitions produce significantly higher likelihoods than expected at random. Marginal likelihoods (Bayes factors) are used to perform model selection among taxonomic ranks. We show that food webs are best explained by the coarser taxonomic ranks (kingdom to class). Our methods provide a way to explicitly include evolutionary history in models for food web structure.
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| 4. |
- Eklöf, Anna, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Secondary extinctions in food webs : a Bayesian network approach
- 2013
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Ingår i: Methods in Ecology and Evolution. - : Wiley-Blackwell. - 2041-210X. ; 4:8, s. 760-770
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Ecological communities are composed of populations connected in tangled networks of ecological interactions. Therefore, the extinction of a species can reverberate through the network and cause other (possibly distantly connected) species to go extinct as well. The study of these secondary extinctions is a fertile area of research in ecological network theory.However, to facilitate practical applications, several improvements to the current analytical approaches are needed. In particular, we need to consider that (i) species have different ‘a priori’ probabilities of extinction, (ii) disturbances can simultaneously affect several species, and (iii) extinction risk of consumers likely grows with resource loss. All these points can be included in dynamical models, which are, however, difficult to parameterize.Here we advance the study of secondary extinctions with Bayesian networks. We show how this approach can account for different extinction responses using binary – where each resource has the same importance – and quantitative data – where resources are weighted by their importance. We simulate ecological networks using a popular dynamical model (the Allometric Trophic Network model) and use it to test our method.We find that the Bayesian network model captures the majority of the secondary extinctions produced by the dynamical model and that consumers’ responses to species loss are best modelled using a nonlinear sigmoid function. We also show that an approach based exclusively on food web structure loses power when species at higher trophic levels are preferentially lost. Because the loss of apex predators is unfortunately widespread, the results highlight a serious limitation of studies on network robustness.
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| 5. |
- Eklöf, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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The dimensionality of ecological networks
- 2013
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Ingår i: Ecology Letters. - : Blackwell Publishing. - 1461-023X .- 1461-0248. ; 16:5, s. 577-583
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How many dimensions (trait-axes) are required to predict whether two species interact? This unansweredquestion originated with the idea of ecological niches, and yet bears relevance today for understanding whatdetermines network structure. Here, we analyse a set of 200 ecological networks, including food webs,antagonistic and mutualistic networks, and find that the number of dimensions needed to completelyexplain all interactions is small ( < 10), with model selection favouring less than five. Using 18 high-qualitywebs including several species traits, we identify which traits contribute the most to explaining networkstructure. We show that accounting for a few traits dramatically improves our understanding of the structureof ecological networks. Matching traits for resources and consumers, for example, fruit size and billgape, are the most successful combinations. These results link ecologically important species attributes tolarge-scale community structure.
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| 6. |
- Zook, Alexander E, et al.
(författare)
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Food webs : ordering species according to body size yields high degree of intervality
- 2011
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Ingår i: Journal of Theoretical Biology. - : Elsevier. - 0022-5193 .- 1095-8541. ; 271:1, s. 106-113
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Food webs, the networks describing "who eats whom" in an ecosystem, are nearly interval, i.e. there is a way to order the species so that almost all the resources of each consumer are adjacent in the ordering. This feature has important consequences, as it means that the structure of food webs can be described using a single (or few) species' traits. Moreover, exploiting the quasi-intervality found in empirical webs can help build better models for food web structure. Here we investigate which species trait is a good proxy for ordering the species to produce quasi-interval orderings. We find that body size produces a significant degree of intervality in almost all food webs analyzed, although it does not match the maximum intervality for the networks. There is also a great variability between webs. Other orderings based on trophic levels produce a lower level of intervality. Finally, we extend the concept of intervality from predator-centered (in which resources are in intervals) to prey-centered (in which consumers are in intervals). In this case as well we find that body size yields a significant, but not maximal, level of intervality. These results show that body size is an important, although not perfect, trait that shapes species interactions in food webs. This has important implications for the formulation of simple models used to construct realistic representations of food webs.
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