Beware greedy algorithms

Abstract

Nestedness – the tendency for specialist species to interact with subsets of the species that generalist species interact with – is a pervasive feature of empirical mutualistic communities (Bascompte, Jordano, Melián, & Olesen, 2003). While theoretical work has discovered important dynamical implications of nestedness, such as enhanced community stability and species coexistence (Bastolla et al., 2009; Rohr, Saavedra, & Bascompte, 2014; Thébault & Fontaine, 2010), there has been less agreement about why networks vary in their levels of nestedness. Answering this question is an important challenge as it has the potential to improve understanding of the mechanisms leading to nested architectures and hence the processes underlying community persistence.