ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Reinterpreting the relationship between number of species and number of links connects community structure and stability.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vegetation Types and Plant Invasion Shape Pollination Interactions on a Tropical Island.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Marine protected areas marginally offset anthropogenic declines in tropical reef fish contributions to nature and people.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Diatoms vs dinoflagellates: a temporal network analysis of bloom impacts on phytoplankton diversity and community structure in French coastal waters.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Network theory predicts ecosystem robustness across environmental conditions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Publication-driven consistency in food web structures: Implications for comparative ecology.Ecology · 2025Article
- Structural dynamics of plant-pollinator mutualistic networks.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- A successional shift enhances stability in ant symbiont communities.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web connectance of tropical forest mammals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Invasive species modulate the structure and stability of a multilayer mutualistic network.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Stability of human gut microbiome: Comparison of ecological modelling and observational approaches.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For 50 years, ecologists have examined how the number of interactions (links) scales with the number of species in ecological networks. Here, we show that the way the number of links varies when species are sequentially removed from a community is fully defined by a single parameter identifiable from empirical data. We mathematically demonstrate that this parameter is network-specific and connects local stability and robustness, establishing a formal connection between community structure and two prime stability concepts. Importantly, this connection highlights a local stability-robustness trade-off, which is stronger in mutualistic than in trophic networks. Analysis of 435 empirical networks confirmed these results. We finally show how our network-specific approach relates to the classical across-network approach found in literature. Taken together, our results elucidate one of the intricate relationships between network structure and stability in community networks.
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