P18-HO-4814 - Interactoma de la biodiversidad: el marc

No single species on Earth lives without interacting with other species. Biodiversity’s interactome is the whole suite of ecological interactions among species that support the Web of Life by providing key functional links among species. While the effects of the present biodiversity crisis have been largely focused on the loss of species, a missed component of biodiversity loss that often accompanies or even precedes species disappearance is the extinction of ecological interactions. A large body of evidence from field experimental ecology shows that cascading effects are most often triggered by species extinctions. This project challenges these views and explores the pace at which interactions and species are lost along gradients of human-driven disturbances like deforestation and defaunation. Ecological interactions are at the core of the Web of Life, supporting Earth’s systems in a wide variety of biomes. Mutualism, facilitation, symbiosis, predation, are pivotal for ecosystem functioning, yet the recent ecological literature still shows a marked bias towards the study of antagonisms. We propose to build on the most recent developments for the characterization and quantification of ecological functions within complex, multilayer interaction networks, focusing on plant-animal mutualisms and antagonisms as case studies (seed dispersal, pollination, herbivory). The project combines insights and expertise from experimental field ecology, population genetics, conservation biology, and landscape ecology in a general framework for assessing Biodiversity’s interactome: its size and the diversity of ecological functions embedded. Beyond assessing the size and topology of this interactome (how many interactions? how distinct ecological functions map onto complex interaction networks?) the project provides a new conceptual framework to understand how species extinctions relate to earlier losses of key supporting interactions along gradients of environmental deterioration.