Ranking of critical species to preserve the functionality of mutualistic networks using the k-core decomposition
1
Centro Universitario U-TAD, Las Rozas, Spain
2
Complex Systems Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
3
E.T.S.I.A.A.B., Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
4
Area of Biodiversity and Conservation, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles, Spain
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Ecosystem Science, Statistics
- Keywords
- Mutualism, k-core decomposition, robustness, complex networks
- Copyright
- © 2017 García-Algarra et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Ranking of critical species to preserve the functionality of mutualistic networks using the k-core decomposition. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2855v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2855v1
Abstract
Mutualistic communities play an important role in biodiversity preservation. They are modeled as bipartite networks and measurements of centrality and degree help to order species and their relative importance for network robustness. Identifying the most endangered ones or those more prone to trigger cascade extinctions is essential to define conservation policies. In this work, we explain how a classical graph analysis tool, the k-core decomposition, provides new ranking magnitudes that reach outstanding performance for these purposes.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.