http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.12081/abstract

Ecology Letters (2013) 16: 577–583 The dimensionality of ecological networks

How many dimensions (trait-axes) are required to predict whether two species interact? This unanswered question originated with the idea of ecological niches, and yet bears relevance today for understanding what determines network structure. Here, we analyse a set of 200 ecological networks, including food webs, antagonistic and mutualistic networks, and find that the number of dimensions needed to completely explain all interactions is small ( < 10), with model selection favouring less than five. Using 18 high-quality webs including several species traits, we identify which traits contribute the most to explaining network structure. We show that accounting for a few traits dramatically improves our understanding of the structure of ecological networks. Matching traits for resources and consumers, for example, fruit size and bill gape, are the most successful combinations. These results link ecologically important species attributes to large-scale community structure.

需要多少维（性状坐标轴）来预测两个物种是否香桧作用？这一至今无解的问题来源于生态位思想并且在现在也与理解什么决定了网络结构相关。本文中我们分析了200组生态网络（包括：食物网、拮抗和互惠网），发现完全解释所有的关系所需的维数很少（<10，用模型进行选择只需<5）。利用18个高质量的网（包括几个物种性状）我们确定了那些性状最能解释网络结构。我们证明了少数几个性状就明显的增加了我们对生态网络的理解。资源和消费者的匹配特征（比如：果实大小和鸟嘴张开的大小）是最好的组合。这些结果将生态上重要的物种特征和大尺度上的群落结构连接了起来。