Bioinformatics Program, Taiwan International Graduate Program, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China.
Biol Lett. 2012 Aug 23;8(4):570-3. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1167. Epub 2012 Feb 22.
Identifying important species for maintaining ecosystem functions is a challenge in ecology. Since species are components of food webs, one way to conceptualize and quantify species importance is from a network perspective. The importance of a species can be quantified by measuring the centrality of its position in a food web, because a central node may have greater influence on others in the network. A species may also be important because it has a unique network position, such that its loss cannot be easily compensated. Therefore, for a food web to be robust, we hypothesize that central species must be functionally redundant in terms of their network position. In this paper, we test our hypothesis by analysing the Prince William Sound ecosystem. We found that species centrality and uniqueness are negatively correlated, and such an observation is also carried over to other food webs.
确定对维持生态系统功能具有重要意义的物种是生态学领域的一个挑战。由于物种是食物网的组成部分，因此从网络角度来概念化和量化物种重要性是一种方法。可以通过衡量其在食物网中位置的中心度来量化一个物种的重要性，因为一个中心节点可能对网络中的其他节点具有更大的影响。一个物种也可能因其具有独特的网络位置而重要，因此其损失不容易得到补偿。因此，我们假设对于一个食物网来说，为了具有稳健性，中央物种在其网络位置上必须具有功能冗余性。在本文中，我们通过分析威廉王子湾生态系统来检验我们的假设。我们发现物种的中心度和独特性呈负相关，这种观察结果也适用于其他食物网。
