Correlations among network and community structure metrics

Kerri Crawford, now a postdoc at Washington University St. Louis, and I were writing a paper about correlations among network and community structures - an attempt to think more explicitly about these two fields.  

 

We include our paper that we submitted to Oikos, and was rejected.  Upon further thinking about this, I don't know if the paper even makes sense!  

 

Figure captions:

Figure 1. Correlations among network structural properties (ordinate) and species richness (abscissa) for animals and plants. Plant-pollinator (empty circles) and plant-seed disperser (filled circles) mutualistic networks are represented. Network structures: number of links (a,b), links per species (c,d), nestedness (e,f), and connectance (g,h; see Table 1 for definitions). Values in each panel represent Pearson correlation coefficients, and p-values (H_o, r = 0). All variables were log₁₀ transformed prior to analysis. Note that all variables are displayed as log₁₀ transformed. Sample sizes: species richness (58-59 communities); evenness (20 communities). Data from the Interaction Web Database (http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/interactionweb/), and Rezende et al. (2007). 

 

Figure 2. Correlations among network structural properties (ordinate) and evenness (abscissa) for animals and plants. Evenness (Pielou’s J) is constrained between zero and one. Larger values of J represent communities with abundance spread more equally among species, whereas small J values represent the presence of few very abundant species. See Figure 1 caption for details on figures.

 

Figure 3. Correlations among network structural properties (ordinate) and mean and standard deviation of the log normal distribution fit to abundance data for each community (abscissa) for animals. See Figure 1 caption for details on figures, and Appendix 1 for abundance distribution model results.

 

Figure 4. Correlations among network structural properties (ordinate) and mean and standard deviation of the log normal distribution fit to abundance data for each community (abscissa) for plants. See Figure 1 caption for details on figures, and Appendix 1 for abundance distribution model results.