specieslevel {bipartite} | R Documentation |
Apart from the properties of the entire web, also its participants can be described specifically. Various simple numbers and indices are calculated and returned.
specieslevel(web, index="ALL")
web |
Web is a matrix representing the interactions observed between higher trophic level species (columns) and lower trophic level species (rows). Usually this will be number of pollinators on each species of plants or number of parasitoids on each species of prey. |
index |
Vector of indices to be calculated for each trophic level of the web; options are: “specs” for number of species, “species degree”, “dependence”, “d” for Blüthgen's d, “species strength” as sum of dependencies, “interaction” for interaction push/pull (our version of dependence asymmetry: see details), “PSI” for pollination service index (or pollinator support index, depending on the trophic level), “NS” for node specialisation index, or “ALL” for all the aforementioned (default). |
This function implements a variety of the many (and still procreating) indices describing species properties. Some are embaracingly simple (such as number of interacting species for each species). Others are variations on Shannon's diversity index applied to within species.
Most indices are straightforward, one-line formulae; some, such as d', also require a re-arranging of the matrix. We (Dormann, Blüthgen, Gruber) came up with a new one, called “Pollination Service Index” or psi, for which a few more details seem appropriate.
PSI is comprised of three calculation steps: firstly, we calculate, for each pollinator species, the proportion to which it visits each plant species (or, phrased anthromorphically, the number to the question: To which proportion do I visit dandelion?). Secondly, we calculate the proportion to which a plant is visited by each bee species (Which proportion of my pollinators are red mason bees?). Multiplying, these two proportions gives the portion of own pollen for each plant species (because this depends both on a pollinators specialisation (step 1) and the plant's specific receptiveness (step 2). Finally, we sum the proportions own pollen delivered across all plant species. This value is the PSI-value. At its maximum, 1, it shows that all pollen delivered to exactly one plant species is derived from one monolectic pollinator. At its minimum, 0, it indicates that a pollinator is irrelevant to all plant species. Note that PSI is independent of the abundance of plants or pollinators: a bee been found only once on a plant species visited by no-one else receives a PSI of 1, even if in total 14 million visits were recorded.
We envisage a penalty for the fact that a pollinator has to make two (more or less successive) visits to the same plant species: the first to take the pollen up, the second to pollinate the next. Thus, using 2 as an exponent in step 1 would simulate that a pollinator deposits all pollen at every second visit (or flies to their nest). That is certainly a too strong penalisation. At present we set the exponent to 1, because the step of controlling for “pollen purity” is already a major improvement. Also, we have no idea to which extent pollen gets mixed and/or lost during foraging flights, and the true exponent remains elusive.
For both the “higher trophic level” and the “higher trophic level” a list with the following components:
number of species |
Sic. |
d |
Specialisation of each species based on its discrimination from random selection of
partners. More specifically, it returns d', which is calculated based on the
raw d , dmin and dmax for each species (see dfun . See Blüthgen et al. (2006) for details. |
Pollination Service Index PSI |
for the higher trophic level, and the equivalent Pollinator Support Index for the lower trophic level. Expresses the value of, say, a pollinator for all plant species as the sum (across all plant species) of the proportion of pollen deposited per visit. The more specialised the pollinator and the fewer pollinators the plants it pollinates, the higher is its value for the plant community. It is a really cool measure, but it's not easy to get one's head around it. Alternatively, one can see it as the inverse of redundancy of the species for the web: the higher the value, the less redundant. |
node specialisation index |
Another measure of specialisation, based on the path length between any two
higher-trophic level species. Species sharing hosts/prey have an FS-value of 1. See specific function
nodespec for details, problems and reference. |
species degree |
Sum of interactions per species. |
dependence |
Web entry divided by column totals (for higher trophic level) or row totals (for lower trophic level). Expresses the proportion of interactions with each species, and sums to 1 for each. |
strength |
Sum of dependencies of each species (proposed in Bascompte et al. 2006). |
interaction push/pull |
Direction of interaction asymmetry: positive values indicate that a species affects the species of the other level it interacts with stronger then they affect it (“pusher”); negative values indicate that a species is, on average, on the receiving end of the stick (“being pulled”); formula based on Vazquez et al (2007), but push/pull is our own nomenclature. Values are highly correlated with species strengths (see below), but standardised to fall between -1 (being pulled) and 1 (pushing). |
Dependencies are still an open field of debate. Dependencies are calculated as the value in a matrix divided by the rowSums
(for the lower trophic level) or the colSums
(for the higher trophic level). As such, any pollinator observed only once will receive a dependency-value of 1, indicating perfect dependence on this plant species. That may or may not be true. In any case it is based on a sample size of 1, that is why the dependency asymmetry (which is based on the dependencies for both trophic levels) has come under criticism and may be rather sensitive to singletons.
We here provide the code to calculate the strength of a species (i.e. sum of its dependencies), based on the current proposal by Bascompte et al. (2006). It may be a good idea to remove all singletons from the web before calculating this index, to investigate whether it is indeed driven by those scarce observations.
Carsten F. Dormann carsten.dormann@ufz.de
Bascompte, J., Jordano, P. and Olesen, J. M. (2006) Asymmetric coevolutionary networks facilitate biodiversity maintenance. Science 312, 431–433
Blüthgen, N., Menzel, F. and Blüthgen, N. (2006) Measuring specialization in species interaction networks. BMC Ecology 6, 9
Vázquez, D. P., Melián, C. J., Williams, N. M., Blüthgen N., Krasnov B. R. and Poulin, R. (2007) Species abundance and asymmetric interaction strength in ecological networks. Oikos 116, 1120–1127
networklevel
for some further comments; dfun
, which is called by this function
data(Safariland) specieslevel(Safariland)