Trends in Ecology & Evolution
OpinionTowards a Probabilistic Understanding About the Context-Dependency of Species Interactions
Section snippets
The Context-Dependency of Species Interactions
Species interactions are central for the persistence (see Glossary) of almost every form of life on Earth [1,2]. However, because biological populations evolve nonlinearly in changing environments [3], species interactions are not fixed and can switch in response to the environmental context established in a given location and time [4,5]. Indeed, several studies have shown that the context-dependency of species interactions does not act equally across all classes of interactions 6., 7., 8., 9..
The Structural Probabilistic Approach
In ecology, the structuralist view has been adapted to study the persistence of species within a given community structure under changing environments [10,40,46,54,55]. This structural approach integrates the notion of structural stability into population dynamics models [10]. Conceptually, a dynamical system is structurally stable if a small change in the system parameters does not change its qualitative behavior 56., 57., 58., 59.. However, because of the uncertainties associated with the
The Switching Probability of Interaction Classes
To illustrate the structural probabilistic approach, let us consider again a simple community formed by three species (e.g., two yeasts, Metschnikowia gruessii and Starmerella bombicola, and one nectar flower, Mimulus aurantiacus), [26,70]), whose community structure is summarized by the interaction matrix A. The elements aij denote the phenomenological direct effect of species j on species i [49] and such effects can be classified as: mutualistic (+,+), antagonistic (+,−), competitive (−,−),
Probability Diagrams to Study Context-Dependency
The application of the structural probabilistic approach can be leveraged by building probability diagrams describing the relative frequency of interaction switches within a given community. The nodes of the diagrams correspond to the community structures (A, B, C, …), while the arrows represent the switching probabilities from one community structure to a different one. For example, let us consider community structures representing the combination of interaction classes among three species.
Generating Probability Diagrams: A Brief Guideline
To generate probability diagrams, we provide the following brief guideline. First, we need to define the number of species forming the community structure (i.e., the nodes). Note that in the complete absence of information, it is possible to generate three-species communities, where the ‘third’ species can simply represent the phenomenological summary effects of unknown species on the two species under consideration. Second, we need to define the nature of species interactions within a
Concluding Remarks
Recent meta-analyses on context dependency of species interactions have shown that mutualism is most likely to switch to antagonism across contexts, while antagonism is least likely to switch to mutualism [7]. Yet, the effect size of these empirical results has not been particularly strong, reflecting that the switching frequency also depends on how researchers measure context dependency [8,9]. Similarly, field studies have shown that the importance of mutualistic interactions relative to
Acknowledgments
We thank Mohammad AlAdwani, Judith Bronstein, Haoran Cai, Simone Cenci, Lucas Medeiros, and Pengjuan Zu for insightful comments. We also thank our editor and three anonymous reviewers for their highly constructive comments that improved the quality of the manuscript. S.S. acknowledges funding by the Mitsui Chair. R.P.R. acknowledges funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, Grant Number 31003A_182386.
Glossary
- Community structure
- the quantitative description of the phenomenological direct effects between the biological populations within a studied community. This is typically known as the interaction matrix. Note that the inverse of this matrix provides the phenomenological total (direct and indirect) effects between populations.
- Constrained parameter space
- the subset of the full parameter space with only ecological possible parameters under ecological constraints.
- Context-dependency of species
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2022, Trends in Ecology and EvolutionCitation Excerpt :Ecological contexts defined by multivariate stressors are pervasive in applied ecology; these include multistressor species distribution models and cumulative effects assessments to identify the extent of anthropogenic impacts under different land use or climate change scenarios. Double-stressor or higher order interactions represent context dependence as typically defined in community ecology [1]: for example, when species interactions shift from mutualistic to antagonistic along environmental or competitor density gradients [6]. Moving beyond qualitative description in biological science implicitly requires some form of stressor-response function.
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2022, Trends in Ecology and EvolutionCitation Excerpt :When studies addressing the same question reach different conclusions, the different outcomes are often attributed to context dependence (see Glossary). Context dependence, or contingency, refers to situations where relationships vary depending on the conditions – the context – under which they are observed (Figure 1) [7–10]. It includes situations where the magnitude (strength) or sign (direction) of a relationship differs under different biotic, abiotic, spatiotemporal, or observational circumstances (Figure 1 and Box 1).
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