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Degree heterogeneity and stability of ecological networks.

ABSTRACT: A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbations. While many advances show how the network architecture of these communities severely constrains such tendencies, one of the most fundamental properties of network structure, i.e. degree heterogeneity-the variability of the number of links associated with each species, deserves further study. Here we show that the effects of degree heterogeneity on stability vary with different types of interspecific interactions. Degree heterogeneity consistently destabilizes ecological networks with both competitive and mutualistic interactions, while its effects on networks of predator-prey interactions such as food webs depend on prey contiguity, i.e. the extent to which the species consume an unbroken sequence of prey in community niche space. Increasing degree heterogeneity tends to stabilize food webs except those with the highest prey contiguity. These findings help explain why food webs are highly but not completely interval and, more broadly, deepen our understanding of the stability of complex ecological networks.

SUBMITTER: Yan G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5493803 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Degree heterogeneity and stability of ecological networks.

Yan Gang G Martinez Neo D ND Liu Yang-Yu YY

Journal of the Royal Society, Interface 20170601 131

A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbations. While many advances show how the network architecture of these communities severely constrains such tendencies, one of the most fundamental properties of network structure, i.e. degree heterogeneity-the variability of the number of links associated with each species, deserves further study. Here we show that the effects of degree heterogeneity on stability vary with ...[more]

PMID: 28637917

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Project description:BackgroundThe existence of negative correlations between degrees of interacting proteins is being discussed since such negative degree correlations were found for the large-scale yeast protein-protein interaction (PPI) network of Ito et al. More recent studies observed no such negative correlations for high-confidence interaction sets. In this article, we analyzed a range of experimentally derived interaction networks to understand the role and prevalence of degree correlations in PPI networks. We investigated how degree correlations influence the structure of networks and their tolerance against perturbations such as the targeted deletion of hubs.ResultsFor each PPI network, we simulated uncorrelated, positively and negatively correlated reference networks. Here, a simple model was developed which can create different types of degree correlations in a network without changing the degree distribution. Differences in static properties associated with degree correlations were compared by analyzing the network characteristics of the original PPI and reference networks. Dynamics were compared by simulating the effect of a selective deletion of hubs in all networks.ConclusionConsiderable differences between the network types were found for the number of components in the original networks. Negatively correlated networks are fragmented into significantly less components than observed for positively correlated networks. On the other hand, the selective deletion of hubs showed an increased structural tolerance to these deletions for the positively correlated networks. This results in a lower rate of interaction loss in these networks compared to the negatively correlated networks and a decreased disintegration rate. Interestingly, real PPI networks are most similar to the randomly correlated references with respect to all properties analyzed. Thus, although structural properties of networks can be modified considerably by degree correlations, biological PPI networks do not actually seem to make use of this possibility.

Dataset Information

Degree heterogeneity and stability of ecological networks.

Publications

Degree heterogeneity and stability of ecological networks.

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