Identifying compartments in ecological networks based on energy channels

Abstract

It has been confirmed in many food webs that the interactions between species are divided into “compartments,” that is, subgroups of highly interacting taxa with few weak interactions between the subgroups. Many of the current methods for detecting compartments in food webs are borrowed from network theory, which do little to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning them. Therefore, a method based on ecological context is needed. Here, we develop a new method for detecting compartments in food webs based on the reliance of each node on energy derived from basal resources (i.e., producers or decomposers). Additional Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to test the significance of the compartmentalization. Further, we applied a food web dynamics model to test whether the effects of permutation would be retained within a single compartment. The proposed method identified significant compartments in 23 of the 28 empirical food webs that were investigated. We further demonstrated that the effects of node removal were significantly higher within compartments than between compartments. Our methods and results emphasize the importance of energy channels in forming food web structures, which sheds light on the mechanisms of self-organization within food webs.