SVD entropy reveals the high complexity of ecological networks

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.623141. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

Add a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.


Comments

There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.

Downloads

Download Preprint

Supplementary Files
Authors

Tanya Strydom , Giulio Valentino Dalla Riva, Timothée Poisot 

Abstract

Quantifying the complexity of ecological networks has remained elusive. Primarily, complexity has been defined on the basis of the structural (or behavioural) complexity of the system. These definitions ignore the notion of physical complexity, which can measure the amount of information contained in an ecological network, and how difficult it would be to compress. We present relative rank deficiency and SVD entropy as measures of external and internal complexity respectively. Using bipartite ecological networks, we find that they all show a very high, almost maximal, physical complexity. Pollination networks, in particular, are more complex when compared to other types of interactions. In addition, we find that SVD entropy relates to other structural measures of complexity (nestedness, connectance, and spectral radius), but does not inform about the resilience of a network when using simulated extinction cascades, which has previously been reported for structural measures of complexity. We argue that SVD entropy provides a fundamentally more correct measure of network complexity and should be added to the toolkit of descriptors of ecological networks moving forward.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/q9v85

Subjects

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Keywords

complexity, ecological networks, singular value decompsotion

Dates

Published: 2020-11-03 04:34

Last Updated: 2020-11-14 03:10

Older Versions
License

CC-By Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International