Resurrecting collapsed ecological networks

Resurrecting collapsed ecological networks: the importance of structural and eco-evolutionary factors

Complex ecological communities, for instance, a mutualistic community, could often exhibit abrupt transitions from a stable desirable community state to an undesirable state where the loss of ecosystem functioning and services could occur. Such an abrupt transition occurs when environmental conditions cross a certain threshold that impacts topological features of the community. Naturally, when such a transition occurs there are drastic and undesirable changes in ecosystem functions and services provided by them. There is, thus, a lot of importance in understanding the occurrence of such tipping points with an aim to reverse such undesirable affects. However, the problem in reversing such undesirable change is that- just by restoring species in a network does not guarantee community recovery to a desirable functional state. This is because such ecological systems quite often exhibit a phenomenon known as “hysteresis”, whereby the ecological system could occupy both functional and dysfunctional state for the same environmental conditions, making recovery to a fully functional state a huge problem. Thus, reconstructing or recovering an ecological network from an undesirable state is another problem that has not been tackled yet.