Sampling networks of ecological interactions

作者：Pedro Jordano · 发表于：Functional Ecology · 年份：2016 · DOI：10.1111/1365-2435.12763 · 被引用次数：373 · 研究领域：Plant and animal studies、Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Species Distribution and Climate Change

Summary Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases and constraints as sampling individuals and species in biodiversity inventories. Robust estimates of the actual number of interactions (links) within diversified ecological networks require adequate sampling effort that needs to be explicitly gauged. Yet we still lack a sampling theory explicitly focusing on ecological interactions. While the complete inventory of interactions is likely impossible, a robust characterization of its main patterns and metrics is probably realistic. We must acknowledge that a sizeable fraction of the maximum number of interactions among, say, A animal species and P plant species (i.e. ) is impossible to record due to forbidden links, that is life‐history restrictions. Thus, the number of observed interactions I in robustly sampled networks is typically , resulting in sparse interaction matrices with low connectance. Here I provide a review and outline a conceptual framework for interaction sampling by building an explicit analogue to individuals and species sampling, thus extending diversity‐monitoring approaches to the characterization of complex networks of ecological interactions. Contrary to species inventories, a sizable fraction of non‐observed pairwise interactions cannot be sampled, due to biological constraints that forbid their occurrence. Reasons for forbidden links are multiple but mainly stem from spatial and temporal uncoupling, size mis...