Asymmetric Coevolutionary Networks Facilitate Biodiversity Maintenance

The mutualistic interactions between plants and their pollinators or seed dispersers have played a major role in the maintenance of Earth's biodiversity. To investigate how coevolutionary interactions are shaped within species-rich communities, we characterized the architecture of an array of quantitative, mutualistic networks spanning a broad geographic range. These coevolutionary networks are highly asymmetric, so that if a plant species depends strongly on an animal species, the animal depends weakly on the plant. By using a simple dynamical model, we showed that asymmetries inherent in coevolutionary networks may enhance long-term coexistence and facilitate biodiversity maintenance.

• Publication year

  2006

• Venue

  Science

• Publication date

  2006-04-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/science.1123412PMID 16627742
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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