The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The dimensionality of ecological networks
Open accessAbstract
How many dimensions (trait‐axes) are required to predict whether two species interact? This unanswered question originated with the idea of ecological niches, and yet bears relevance today for understanding what determines 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 completely explain all interactions is small ( < 10), with model selection favouring less than five. Using 18 high‐quality webs including several species traits, we identify which traits contribute the most to explaining network structure. We show that accounting for a few traits dramatically improves our understanding of the structure of ecological networks. Matching traits for resources and consumers, for example, fruit size and bill gape, are the most successful combinations. These results link ecologically important species attributes to large‐scale community structure.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Model selection and multimodel inference: a practical information-theoretic approach.
Guthery, F. S., Burnham, K. P., & Anderson, D. R. (2003) · The Journal of Wildlife Management · doi:10.2307/3802723 · Cited by 41,495
Research works printed but not linked: 45
- Adiga A. Chandran L.S.&Sivadasan N.(2008).Lower bounds for boxicity. arXiv preprint arXiv:0806.3175. Only in the arXiv. · arXiv
- 10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.06.040 · DOI
- 10.1126/science.1156269 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1002/j.1537-2197.1982.tb13237.x · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1016/j.ecocom.2007.06.013 · DOI
- 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01296.x · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1007/s00285-010-0383-3 · DOI
- 10.1890/03-9000 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2010.01778.x · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2656.2010.01778.x
- 10.1038/nature02327 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2011.01883.x · DOI · Paper page
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226101811.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1016/S0304-3800(99)00022-8 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1073/pnas.0910582106 · DOI
- 10.1007/s00442-008-1255-z · DOI
- 10.1890/10-1594.1 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1098/rspb.2011.2149 · DOI
- 10.1098/rstb.2010.0145 · DOI · Paper page
- Galetti M., 1996, Fruit eating by birds in a forest fragment in southeastern brazil, Ararajuba, 4, 71
- 10.1038/nature10853 · DOI
- 10.2307/1936841 · DOI · Paper page
- Jacob U., 2005, Trophic Dynamics of Antarctic Shelf Ecosystems – Food Webs and Energy Flow Budgets, Thesis
- 10.1016/B978-0-12-386475-8.00005-8 · DOI
- 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00403.x · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1016/0166-218X(94)90143-0 · doi:10.1016/0166-218x(94)90143-0
- McCullen C.K., 1993, Flower‐visiting insects of the galapagos islands, Pan‐Pac. Entomol., 69, 95
- 10.1890/07-1241.1 · doi:10.1890/07-1241.1
- Optiz S., 1996, Trophic Interactions in Caribbean Coral Reefs
- Petanidou T., 1991, Pollination Ecology in a Phryganic Ecosystem, Thesis
- 10.1073/pnas.0710672105 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1016/B978-0-12-381363-3.00003-4 · DOI
- Roberts F.S., 1969, On the Boxicity and Cubicity of a Graph
- Roberts F.(1978).Food webs competition graphs and the boxicity of ecological phase space. Y. Alavi D. Lick (Eds.) Theory and Applications of Graphs Springer New York pp.477–490. · doi:10.1007/bfb0070404
- 10.1098/rsif.2010.0111 · DOI
- 10.1046/j.1365-2745.2001.00553.x · DOI
- Stouffer D.B., 2006, A robust measure of food web intervality, P. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 103, 19015, 10.1073/pnas.0603844103 · DOI
- 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2011.01812.x · DOI
- 10.1016/j.disc.2008.04.011 · doi:10.1016/j.disc.2008.04.011
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226118697.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1038/nature05429 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1007/BF00346475 · DOI
- 10.1093/aob/mcp057 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1038/35004572 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1890/11-0200.1 · DOI
- 10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.11.045 · DOI
Cited by
Pichler, M., Boreux, V., Klein, A., Schleuning, M., & Hartig, F. (2020) · Methods in Ecology and Evolution · doi:10.1111/2041-210x.13329 · Cited by 149
Dainese, M., Isaac, N. J. B., Powney, G. D., Bommarco, R., Öckinger, E., Kuussaari, M., Pöyry, J., Benton, T. G., Gabriel, D., Hodgson, J. A., et al. (2017) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.13601 · Cited by 38
Animal‐mediated seed dispersal: A review of study methods
Beckman, N. G., Kuprewicz, E. K., Borah, B., Bullock, J. M., Gallinat, A. S., González‐Varo, J. P., Jain, A., Lim, J. Y., Motta, C. I., Nevo, O., et al. (2026) · Applications in Plant Sciences · doi:10.1002/aps3.70043 · Cited by 3
Metadata
- Authors
- Eklöf, A., Jacob, U., Kopp, J., Bosch, J., Castro‐Urgal, R., Chacoff, N. P., Dalsgaard, B., de Sassi, C., Galetti, M., Guimarães, P. R., Lomáscolo, S. B., Martín González, A. M., Pizo, M. A., Rader, R., Rodrigo, A., Tylianakis, J. M., Vázquez, D. P., & Allesina, S.
- Venue
- Ecology Letters
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2013-02-26
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 577-583
- ISSN
- 1461-023X (ISSN-L)
- 1461-0248
- OpenAlex
- W2149644666
- Cited by
- 339
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 27.52
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.