Speaker
Prof.
Jordi Bascompte
(Estación Biológica de Doñana, CSIC)
Description
The mutualistic interactions between plants and the animals
that pollinate them or disperse their seeds can form complex
networks involving hundreds of species. These coevolutionary
networks are highly heterogeneous, nested, and built upon
weak and asymmetric links among species. Such general
architectural patterns increase network robustness to random
extinctions and maximize the number of coexisting species.
Therefore, mutualistic networks can be viewed as the
architecture of biodiversity. However, because
pylogenetically similar species tend to play similar roles
in the network, extinction events trigger non-random
coextinction cascades. This implies that taxonomic diversity
is lost faster than expected if there was no relationship
between phylogeny and network structure. I will conclude by
exploring the trade-offs between a species’ relative
contribution to the above patterns of network architecture,
and its own survival probability.
