TIGP (BIO)—A network-based perspective on biodiversity

Abstract

Conventionally, biodiversity of an ecosystem can be measured in terms of species composition, diversity in genetic information, and diversity in the morphological traits among species. Since species interact trophically forming a network, also known as as a food web, we argue that information on “what they do” and “how they interact” can also contribute to our understanding on biodiversity. Here, we propose several network-based biodiversity measures that utilize information on species functional roles, species network positions in a food web, and species interaction patterns. We applied our methodology to 92 ecosystems and quantified their network-based biodiversity. We investigated how network-based biodiversity changes with latitude and how it varies among different ecosystem types. We further investigated how network-based biodiversity relates with the structure of an ecosystem. Our analysis shows that high biodiversity is observed for ecosystems that are far away from the tropical zone, and estuarine ecosystems tend to have higher biodiversity than others. Furthermore, ecosystems with high biodiversity tend to have sparse network structure, low robustness property, and modular organization.

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