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Qualitative and quantitative responses to press perturbations in ecological networks

Giordano, Giulia LU and Altafini, Claudio (2017) In Scientific Reports
Abstract
Predicting the sign of press perturbation responses in ecological networks is challenging, due to the poor knowledge of the strength of the direct interactions among the species, and to the entangled coexistence of direct and indirect effects. We show in this paper that, for a class of networks that includes mutualistic and monotone networks, the sign of press perturbation responses can be qualitatively determined based only on the sign pattern of the community matrix, without any knowledge of parameter values. For other classes of networks, we show that a semi-qualitative approach yields sufficient conditions for community matrices with a given sign pattern to exhibit mutualistic responses to press perturbations; quantitative conditions... (More)
Predicting the sign of press perturbation responses in ecological networks is challenging, due to the poor knowledge of the strength of the direct interactions among the species, and to the entangled coexistence of direct and indirect effects. We show in this paper that, for a class of networks that includes mutualistic and monotone networks, the sign of press perturbation responses can be qualitatively determined based only on the sign pattern of the community matrix, without any knowledge of parameter values. For other classes of networks, we show that a semi-qualitative approach yields sufficient conditions for community matrices with a given sign pattern to exhibit mutualistic responses to press perturbations; quantitative conditions can be provided as well for community matrices that are eventually nonnegative. We also present a computational test that can be applied to any class of networks so as to check whether the sign of the responses to press perturbations is constant in spite of parameter variations. (Less)
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author
and
organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to journal
publication status
published
subject
in
Scientific Reports
article number
11378
publisher
Nature Publishing Group
external identifiers
  • scopus:85029301941
  • pmid:28900208
  • wos:000410297900092
ISSN
2045-2322
DOI
10.1038/s41598-017-11221-0
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
75a5a2eb-1149-45b6-b354-a9aac5cfdb2d
date added to LUP
2017-08-22 11:23:02
date last changed
2022-05-02 21:48:32
@article{75a5a2eb-1149-45b6-b354-a9aac5cfdb2d,
  abstract     = {{Predicting the sign of press perturbation responses in ecological networks is challenging, due to the poor knowledge of the strength of the direct interactions among the species, and to the entangled coexistence of direct and indirect effects. We show in this paper that, for a class of networks that includes mutualistic and monotone networks, the sign of press perturbation responses can be qualitatively determined based only on the sign pattern of the community matrix, without any knowledge of parameter values. For other classes of networks, we show that a semi-qualitative approach yields sufficient conditions for community matrices with a given sign pattern to exhibit mutualistic responses to press perturbations; quantitative conditions can be provided as well for community matrices that are eventually nonnegative. We also present a computational test that can be applied to any class of networks so as to check whether the sign of the responses to press perturbations is constant in spite of parameter variations.}},
  author       = {{Giordano, Giulia and Altafini, Claudio}},
  issn         = {{2045-2322}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  publisher    = {{Nature Publishing Group}},
  series       = {{Scientific Reports}},
  title        = {{Qualitative and quantitative responses to press perturbations in ecological networks}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11221-0}},
  doi          = {{10.1038/s41598-017-11221-0}},
  year         = {{2017}},
}