Biology subjects

Bascompte, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Bascompte, J..

18 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Ecological networks balance connectivity with flexibility to perturbations

The complexity-stability debate in ecology remains unresolved in part because its empirical basis is limited. Most evidence for the predicted decline of connectance with species richness comes from food webs, leaving unclear whether this pattern extends across the full spectrum of ecological interactions. Moreover, existing results remain conceptually unresolved: connectance decreases with diversity, yet both the total number of interactions and the number of interactions per species increase. Here, we analyze 1,500 ecological interaction networks spanning diverse habitats and interaction types. We show that these patterns are broadly shared across ecological interaction networks and can be interpreted through a recent theory of information dynamics in complex networks, in which sparsity is favored by a trade-off between signal propagation and response diversity. Our results suggest that the structural component of the debate may indeed reflect a general architectural regularity of ecological communities rather than a contradiction between theory and nature.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Local and Spatial Processes Shape the Collapse and Recovery of Mutualistic Networks

Ecosystems can undergo abrupt critical transitions even when environmental change is gradual, resulting in hysteresis, where recovery requires conditions far more favorable than those that triggered collapse. While previous research has mainly focused on local network dynamics, the role of spatial heterogeneity and dispersal in mutualistic ecosystem resilience remains less explored. This study examines how spatial structures--grid, random, small-world, and scale-free networks--interact with dispersal rates to influence ecosystem recovery and mutualistic network persistence. We find that with low dispersal, restoration cost is similar across spatial structures, but at intermediate dispersal rates, scale-free networks show faster recovery and smaller restoration costs. At high dispersal rates, increased connectivity initially reduces restoration cost; however, over time, homogenization weakens spatial heterogeneity, causing restoration cost to increase. Importantly, increasing nestedness can delay collapse but also extends the recovery distance, making ecosystems harder to restore. By adjusting dispersal rates and transitioning from homogeneous to heterogeneous spatial structures, we can decrease restoration cost and improve ecosystem stability, offering key insights for ecological management strategies.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Quantifying the geographic mosaic of coevolutionary temperature: from coldspots to hotspots

The Geographic Mosaic Theory of Coevolution (GMTC) predicts that reciprocal evolutionary effects vary across landscapes, generating hotspots and coldspots. Traditionally, these states are treated as discrete categories, even though the intensity of coevolutionary selection can vary continuously. To capture this variation, we introduce a concept of coevolutionary temperature, ranging from coldspot to hotspot. We propose two complementary metrics to quantify it: reciprocity and strength of pairwise evolutionary effects. We also extend the GMTC framework beyond its traditional focus on pairwise systems to species-rich communities. Applying this approach to empirical plant-pollinator networks in a fragmented landscape, we find pronounced geographic mosaics in coevolutionary temperature. Smaller habitat patches support small, highly connected, and weakly nested communities with high reciprocity and strength, suggesting that they act as coevolutionary hotspots. In contrast, larger patches host species-rich, poorly connected, and highly nested communities with low reciprocity and strength, consistent with coldspots. At the interaction scale, reciprocity depends on degree similarity, with interactions between species that have similar numbers of partners exhibiting higher reciprocity. Together, these results highlight the strong dependence of coevolutionary effects on spatial variation in community structure and show how extending the geographic mosaic framework to species-rich communities can deepen our understanding of coevolution in complex systems.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Landscape configuration and community structure jointlydetermine the persistence of mutualists under habitat loss

Habitat loss poses a major threat to biodiversity. Its effects on ecological communities depend on the complex interplay between the landscape configuration -- the patterns of connections between habitat patches, community structure -- the patterns of interactions between species, and habitat loss patterns. Despite their individual importance, their joint effect on species persistence remains poorly understood. We explore how these three factors influence the persistence of empirical mutualistic communities. By employing spatially explicit metacommunity models, we find that landscapes with a heterogeneous distribution of connections between habitat patches exhibit high persistence under spatially-uncorrelated habitat loss but are highly vulnerable to spatially-correlated loss, where adjacent habitat patches are destroyed sequentially. Homogeneous landscapes with regularly arranged patches have lower persistence than heterogeneous landscapes but are more resilient to correlated habitat loss. The metacommunity nested structure of species interactions enhances persistence, with varying magnitude depending on landscape configuration and the patterns of habitat loss. These results can guide conservation strategies by identifying landscape and community features that promote species persistence.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

The roles of space and food web complexity in mediating ecological recovery

Landscape-scale ecological restoration is a key strategy for halting and reversing biodiversity decline. However, ensuring the long-term sustainability of restoration efforts requires guiding the recovery of complex ecological systems with many interdependent species at a landscape scale. Due to these challenges, our understanding of recovery trajectories remains limited. Using experiments and metapopulation models, we explore how the spatial configuration of communities and food web complexity jointly influence species recovery at different spatial scales. We find that the number and spatial placement of communities affects the colonisation of empty habitat patches, but does not influence population recovery in patches where communities are introduced. Food web complexity reduces the recovery of lower trophic levels, both at population and metapopulation scales. However, this negative effect may be partially mitigated at higher levels of food web complexity. Our results demonstrate that the joint consideration of spatial configuration and species interactions could enhance the effectiveness of restoration actions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Amazonian biocultural heritage under climate change

Amazonia harbors one fourth of the worlds plant diversity and over 300 Indigenous groups. So far, however, no study has assessed how climate change may simultaneously impact its biological and cultural heritage. To bridge this gap, we assembled a database on 5,833 utilized plant species and show that climate change will reduce more the ranges of utilized than of non-utilized species by 2070. Locally, Indigenous cultures may lose an average of 65% of their utilized plant species and 50% of their associated services from climate change. Regionally, the loss of threatened languages may result in a 41% reduction in the Amazonian knowledge pool. Overall, our results point to the strong climate vulnerability of Amazonian biocultural heritage.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Coevolution increases robustness to extinctions in mutualistic but not antagonistic communities

Co-extinctions may exacerbate the current biodiversity crisis. Yet, we do not understand all the factors that shape the robustness of communities to the loss of species. Here we analyse how coevolution influences the robustness of mutualistic and antagonistic communities. We find that coevolution increases robustness in mutualism but reduces it in antagonism. These differences are due to coevolution altering the density of interactions in communities. The largest changes to robustness occur when coevolutionary selection is strong. Yet, the effect size of coevolution on robustness depends on the size of the community. Our results may broaden the suite of mechanisms affecting the resilience of ecological communities. These insights may inform efforts to reduce the risk of species loss in the face of global change.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Habitat restoration and the recovery of metacommunities

Ecosystem restoration is becoming a widely recognised solution to the biodiversity crisis. However, there is a gap between restoration science and practice. Specifically, we lack a theoretical framework which would improve our understanding of ecosystems recovery and allow us to optimise restoration design. Here, we narrow this gap by developing spatially explicit metacommunity models and studying the recovery dynamics of communities during restoration. We show that community response depends on how damaged the landscape is prior to restoration, with highly fragmented landscapes imposing greater challenges to community recovery. In such cases, we found that the recovery depends on the type of interaction and the structure of the interaction network. Finally, we demonstrate that community recovery can be maximised with careful spatial planning. When recovering communities composed of antagonistic interactions, restoration should target areas adjacent to the most species-rich sites. In the case of mutualistic communities, the same strategy should be adopted in the short-term, whereas in the long-term, restoration should be extended to sites that improve the overall connectivity of the landscape. Our results highlight the importance of considering interactions between species and spatial planning in restoration projects.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Genome-wide association study highlights escape from aphids by delayed growth in Arabidopsis thaliana

Field studies have shown that plant phenological and architectural traits often explain substantial variation in herbivory. Although plant genes involved in physical and chemical defense are well studied, less is known about the genetic basis underlying effects of plant growth traits on herbivory. Here, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of aphid abundance in a field population of Arabidopsis thaliana. This field GWAS detected a significant peak on the third chromosome of A. thaliana. Out of candidate genes near this significant genomic region, a mutant of a ribosomal gene (AT3G13882) exhibited slower growth and later flowering than a wild type under laboratory conditions. A no-choice assay with the turnip aphid, Lipaphis erysimi, found that aphids were unable to successfully establish on the mutant. These findings suggest the potential role of growth-related genes in altering herbivore abundance.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Effects of habitat destruction on coevolving metacommunities

Habitat destruction is a growing threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services. The ecological consequences of habitat loss and fragmentation involve reductions in species abundance and even the extinction of species and interactions. However, we do not yet understand how habitat loss can alter the coevolutionary trajectories of the remaining species or how coevolution, in turn, affects their response to habitat loss. To investigate this, we develop a spatially explicit model which couples metacommunity and coevolutionary dynamics. We show that, by changing the size, composition and structure of local networks, habitat destruction increases the diversity of coevolutionary outcomes across the landscape. Furthermore, we show that while coevolution dampens the negative effects of habitat destruction in mutualistic networks, its effects on the persistence of antagonistic communities are less predictable.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

The role of indirect effects in coevolution as mutualism transitions into antagonism

Species interactions have evolved from antagonistic to mutualistic and back several times throughout lifes history. Yet, it is unclear how changes in the type of interaction between species alter the coevolutionary dynamics of entire communities. This is a pressing matter, as transitions from mutualisms to antagonisms may be becoming more common with human-induced global change. Here, we combine network and evolutionary theory to simulate how shifts in interaction types alter the coevolution of empirical communities. We show that as mutualistic networks shift to antagonistic, selection imposed by direct partners begins to outweigh that imposed by indirect partners. This weakening of indirect effects is associated with communities losing their tight integration of traits and increasing their rate of adaptation. The above changes are more pronounced when specialist consumers are the first species to switch to antagonism. A shift in the outcome of species interactions may therefore reverberate across communities and alter the direction and speed of coevolution.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2021

The joint role of coevolutionary selection and network structure in shaping trait complementarity in mutualisms.

Coevolution can sculpt remarkable trait similarity between mutualistic partners. Yet, it remains unclear which network topologies and selection regimes enhance such trait complementarity. To address this, we simulate coevolution in topologically-distinct net-works under a gradient of mutualistic selection strength. We describe three main insights. First, trait matching is jointly influenced by the strength of mutualistic selection and the structural properties of the network where coevolution is unfolding. Second, the strength of mutualistic selection determines the network descriptors better correlated with higher trait matching. When coevolution is weak, network modularity enhances trait matching, but when it is strong, network connectance amplifies trait matching. Third, the structural properties of networks outrank those of modules or species in determining the evolved degree of trait matching. Our findings suggest networks can both enhance or constrain trait complementary, depending on the strength of mutualistic selection.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

There are nearly 7,400 languages in the world and over 30% of these will no longer be spoken by the end of the century1. So far, however, our understanding of whether language extinction may result in the loss of linguistically-unique knowledge remains limited. Here, we ask to what degree indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants is associated to individual languages and quantify how much indigenous knowledge may vanish as languages and plants go extinct. Focussing on three independent re-gions that have a high biocultural diversity --North America, northwest Amazonia, and New Guinea--we show that >75% of all 12,495 medicinal plant services are linguistically-unique, i.e., only known to one language. Whereas most plant species associated with linguistically-unique knowledge are not threatened, most languages that report linguistically-unique knowledge are. Our finding of high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages suggests that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Genetic diversity increases food-web persistence in the face of climate warming

Genetic diversity provides the raw material for species to adapt and persist in the face of climate change. Yet, the extent to which these genetic effects scale at the level of ecological communities remains unclear. Here we experimentally test the effect of plant genetic diversity on the persistence of an insect food web under a current and future warming scenario. We found that plant genetic diversity increased food-web persistence by increasing the intrinsic growth rates of species across multiple trophic levels. This positive effect was robust to a 3{degrees}C warming scenario and resulted from allelic variation at two genes that control the biosynthesis of chemical defenses. Our results suggest that the ongoing loss of genetic diversity may undermine the persistence and functioning of ecosystems in a changing world. One Sentence SummaryThe loss of genetic diversity accelerates the extinction of inter-connected species from an experimental food web.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Plant cheaters preferentially target arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi that are highly connected to mutualistic plants

O_LIHow antagonists - mycoheterotrophic plants that obtain carbon and soil nutrients from fungi - are integrated in the usually mutualistic arbuscular mycorrhizal networks is unknown. Here, we compare mutualistic and antagonistic plant associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and use network analysis to investigate fungal association preferences in the tripartite network. C_LIO_LIWe sequenced root tips from mutualistic and antagonistic plants in a tropical forest to assemble the combined tripartite network between mutualistic plants, mycorrhizal fungi, and antagonistic plants. We compared the fungal ecological similarity between mutualistic and antagonist networks, and searched for modules (an antagonistic and a mutualistic plant interacting with the same pair of fungi) to investigate whether pairs of fungi simultaneously linked to plant species from each interaction type were overrepresented throughout the network. C_LIO_LIAntagonistic plants interacted with approximately half the fungi detected in mutualistic plants. Antagonists were indirectly linked to any of the detected mutualistic plants, and fungal pairwise ecological distances were correlated in both network types. Moreover, pairs of fungi sharing the same antagonistic and mutualistic plant species occurred more often than expected by chance. C_LIO_LIWe hypothesize that the maintenance of antagonistic interactions is maximized by targeting well-linked mutualistic fungi, thereby minimizing the risk of carbon supply shortages. C_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Invariance in ecological pattern

The abundance of different species in a community often follows the log series distribution. Other ecological patterns also have simple forms. Why does the complexity and variability of ecological systems reduce to such simplicity? Common answers include maximum entropy, neutrality, and convergent outcome from different underlying biological processes. This article proposes a more general answer based on the concept of invariance, the property by which a pattern remains the same after transformation. Invariance has a long tradition in physics. For example, general relativity emphasizes the need for the equations describing the laws of physics to have the same form in all frames of reference. By bringing this unifying invariance approach into ecology, we show that the log series pattern dominates when the consequences of processes acting on abundance are invariant to the addition or multiplication of abundance by a constant. The lognormal pattern dominates when the processes acting on net species growth rate obey rotational invariance (symmetry) with respect to the summing up of the individual component processes. Recognizing how these invariances connect pattern to process leads to a synthesis of previous approaches. First, invariance provides a simpler and more fundamental maximum entropy derivation of the log series distribution. Second, invariance provides a simple derivation of the key result from neutral theory: the log series at the metacommunity scale and a clearer form of the skewed lognormal at the local community scale. The invariance expressions are easy to understand because they uniquely describe the basic underlying components that shape pattern.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Phenotypic evolution is more constrained in simpler food webs

Global change is simplifying the structure of ecological networks; however, we are currently in a poor position to predict how these simplified communities will affect the evolutionary potential of remaining populations. Theory on adaptive landscapes provides a framework for predicting how selection constrains phenotypic evolution, but often treats the community context of evolving populations as a "black box". Here, we integrate ecological networks and adaptive landscapes to examine how changes in food-web complexity shape evolutionary constraints. We conducted a field experiment that manipulated the diversity of insect parasitoids (food-web complexity) that were able to impose selection on an insect herbivore. We then measured herbivore survival as a function of three key phenotypic traits. We found that more traits were under selection in simpler vs. more complex food webs. The adaptive landscape was more neutral in complex food webs because different parasitoid species impose different selection pressures, minimizing relative fitness differences among phenotypes. Our results suggest that phenotypic evolution becomes more constrained in simplified food webs. This indicates that the simplification of ecological communities may constrain the adaptive potential of remaining populations to future environmental change. "What escapes the eye, however, is a much more insidious kind of extinction: the extinction of ecological interactions." Janzen (1974)

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2017

Facilitation between plants shapes pollination networks

SignificanceAlthough it is known that plant-plant and plant-pollinator interactions can strongly influence biodiversity and its effects on ecosystem functioning, the details of how competition and facili-tation among plants scale up to mutualistic interactions with pollinators and thus affect pollina-tion networks are poorly understood. We introduce a simple experimental system in which we control local plant interactions, measure pollinator responses and characterize plant-pollinator networks. We find that facilitation among plants produces synergistic and antagonistic effects on the pollinator community affecting the architecture and robustness of plant-pollinator net-works. Our results provide evidence for bottom-up non-additive effects of plant interactions on pollination networks and have implications for the way we study and manage ecosystems.

ecology↗