Ecosystems from the Lens of the Network Perspective
With the rising attention that the network perspective has received as a valid and broadly applicable lens, biologists and ecologists have taken its principles and began applying it to examine qualities of various ecosystems. The network perspective, in these cases, usually helps provide some unique insight on qualities such as adaptive capacity, and even more commonly, resilience. This article contains multiple scientific papers all essentially culminating to the same conclusion.
The first paper affirms that tendency to form groups as well as “global connectivity” or the ability to form connections with distant nodes, both largely contribute to the robustness of both social and ecological systems. It also puts forth that the physical structure of the network tends to matter most when examining the types of biological systems analyzed in these papers. The subsequent papers then cite multiple examples. Perhaps one of the most interesting, titled, “The Value of Small Size,” analyzes forest patches in southern Madagascar. Essentially, the landscape here is very fragmented, yet the amount of landscape covered in plants is high, insinuating a suspicious degree of pollination. It was found that it was not total surface area covered by plants that caused this, but instead the spatial configuration of plants. This feeds back into the idea that the physical structure of the network is perhaps the characteristic that matters most in ecological systems. This led to the conclusion that strategically placed small patches of forest were more essential to the survival of the area at large than less, larger patches. This is because in a fragmented landscape, small segues between nodes led to better formation of groups and more global connectivity.
There is much, much more that this article covers, and I believe that it is a great way to see how the network perspective has such a broad range of applications. Please take a look!
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:200276/FULLTEXT01.pdf