School of Information and Control Engineering, Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi'an 710311, China.
School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, China.
Chaos. 2023 Jul 1;33(7). doi: 10.1063/5.0143274.
The structural nestedness has important effects on the ecosystem's robustness, stability, and species diversity, but quantitative analysis tools are still lacking at present. According to the competitive and mutually beneficial interactions among ecosystems species, we designed a quantitative analysis tool of nestedness on ecosystems metrics by mapping the ecosystems into symbolic networks and calculating the network's competitive nestedness and mutualistic nestedness with an overlap metric, respectively. The results of the real system and network models show that in the competitive and mutualistic coupling network, the competitive nestedness reduces the biodiversity and robustness of the network, but the mutualistic nestedness has the opposite effect. Moreover, the larger the competitive nestedness in the pure structural case, the more unstable the ecological network tends to be. However, once the dynamical governing mechanism is considered, the competitive nestedness would make the system more stable. Our work enables us to understand more specifically the effects of the network structure on ecosystems and helps reveal the mechanism that how nestedness can be changed to increase network stability, species diversity, and robustness.
结构嵌套对生态系统的鲁棒性、稳定性和物种多样性有重要影响，但目前仍缺乏定量分析工具。根据生态系统物种之间的竞争和互利相互作用，我们通过将生态系统映射到符号网络并分别使用重叠度量来计算网络的竞争嵌套和互利嵌套，设计了一种生态系统度量的嵌套定量分析工具。真实系统和网络模型的结果表明，在竞争和互利耦合网络中，竞争嵌套会降低网络的生物多样性和鲁棒性，但互利嵌套则会产生相反的效果。此外，在纯结构情况下，竞争嵌套越大，生态网络越不稳定。然而，一旦考虑动力学控制机制，竞争嵌套会使系统更加稳定。我们的工作使我们能够更具体地了解网络结构对生态系统的影响，并有助于揭示如何改变嵌套来增加网络稳定性、物种多样性和鲁棒性的机制。
