A very brief introduction

Tags

dynamics

This is a very short video about our work and the questions that we ask. Courtesy of the Academy‘s Visualization Studio.

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RESILIENCE AND STABILITY OF PERMO-TRIASSIC KAROO BASIN COMMUNITIES

Tags

biodiversity, extinction, food webs, modeling, paleo-food web, paleontology, simulations, trophic guild

Late Permian community dynamics

This is the second presentation that I made at the Annual Conference of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver last month. The presentation was part of a special session, “Extreme Environmental Conditions and Biotic Responses during the Permian-Triassic Boundary Crisis and Early Triassic Recovery”, co-organized my myself, Tom Algeo, Hugo Bucher and Arne Winguth. The session, spanning two days, was excellent, outstanding, and a lot of fun! I came away with the firm conviction that we are beginning to really understand the massive Permo-Triassic mass extinction, from its causes to consequences to recovery. It truly was a watershed “moment” in the history of the biosphere. The full program for both days can be found here and here. And, here is the abstract. An online copy of the presentation is available here.

RESILIENCE AND STABILITY OF PERMO-TRIASSIC KAROO BASIN COMMUNITIES: THE IMPORTANCE OF SPECIES RICHNESS AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY TO ECOLOGICAL STABILITY AND ECOSYSTEM RECOVERY

ROOPNARINE, Peter, Invertebrate Zoology and Geology, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Dr, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 94118, proopnarine@calacademy.org and ANGIELCZYK, Kenneth D., Department of Geology, The Field Museum, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605

A central question of the P/Tr extinction is the manner in which Permian ecological communities collapsed and E. Triassic ones were built. The end Permian Dicynodon Assemblage Zone (DAZ) has recently been resolved into 3 phases of the extinction spanning ~120ky, followed by the E. Triassic (Induan) Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone (LAZ), offering an opportunity to examine the ecological dynamics of extinction and recovery in enhanced detail. We do this with 2 modelling approaches.

The first model assumes that populations exist in an energetic balance between consumption and predation. Communities are modelled as stochastic variants sampled from a space defined by species richness and functional diversity. Paleoenvironmental data from the DAZ indicate an increasingly seasonal, arid and drought-prone environment. The models were perturbed by simulated reductions of primary productivity. Results show that DAZ Phase 0 (Ph0) was a robust community resistant to low-moderate levels of perturbation with a well-defined collapse threshold. DAZ Ph1 and Ph2, however, exhibit highly variable responses and are significantly less resistant. LAZ similarly exhibits highly variable responses across minor variation of model configurations.

The second model assumes that communities are locally stable, i.e. minor perturbations are followed by asymptotic returns to equilibrium. During this return, however, communities can exhibit transient behavior during which perturbations can be greatly amplified. Amplification is likely to be important in unstable environments when the frequency of perturbations is shorter than the return time to equilibrium. Applying this model to DAZ and LAZ communities shows that the Karoo ecosystem became more limited in its responses to perturbation as the P/Tr boundary was approached, with Ph1 and Ph2 communities exhibiting very little transient behavior. LAZ in contrast exhibits increased transience.

The energetics and stability models are reconcilable in a history where the Karoo ecosystem became more ecologically stable as the extinction unfolded, yet more sensitive to cascading effects of species extinction and reductions of productivity. The Induan ecosystem was an unrecovered one, sensitive to both extinction and minor ecological disturbances.

Modern and paleocommunity analogues

Tags

connectance, coral reef, food webs, marine communities, modeling, Network theory, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, real world networks, Scientific models, trophic guild, trophic level

Last week I gave a keynote presentation at the annual conference of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver. Here is the abstract, and a link to the presentation (pdf file).

ANCIENT AND MODERN COMMUNITIES AS RECIPROCAL ANALOGUES OF PERSISTENCE AND STABILITY

ROOPNARINE, Peter, Invertebrate Zoology and Geology, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Dr, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 94118, proopnarine@calacademy.org
Paleocommunities are spatio-temporally averaged communities structured by biotic interactions and abiotic factors. The best data on paleocommunity structures are estimates of species richness, number of biotic interactions and the topology of interactions. These provide insights into paleoecological dynamics if modern communities are used as analogs; e.g., the recent lionfish invasion of the western Atlantic is the first modern invasion of a marine ecosystem by a high trophic-level predator and serves as an analog for the invasion of paleocommunities by new predators during the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. Despite the invader’s broad diet, it targets very specific parts of the invaded food web. This will lead to non-uniform escalation on evolutionary timescales.

Theoretical ecology provides a rich framework for exploring dynamics of community persistence. Persistence–the stability of species richness and composition on geological timescales–is central to paleoecology. Ecological stability, a community’s return to stability after perturbation, is not necessary for geological persistence. However, it does dictate a community’s response to perturbation, and thus a species’ persistence or extinction. What then is the relationship between paleoecological richness/composition and ecological stability? How do communities respond to losses of species richness or ecological function? Questions of stability and diversity loss are addressed with an examination of transient responses and species deletion stability analyses of end-Permian terrestrial paleocommunities of the Karoo Basin. Transience is measured as the degree to which a perturbation is amplified over ecological time, even as a community returns asymptotically to stability. Transience during times of frequent perturbation, as during times of environmental crises, decreases the likelihood of a persistently stable community. Species deletion stability measures the dynamic response of a community to the loss of single species. It is an open question whether communities become more vulnerable or more resistant during environmental crises. That process, which has occurred repeatedly in the geological past, is important to the fate of threatened modern communities.

Experimental Space

Tags

coral reef, food webs, Network theory, networks

Cayman Islands coral reef food web

Hi everyone, if any of you will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in the coming month, there is an exhibition at the Aggregate Space Art Gallery, featuring scientific visualizations. A couple of pieces there are from my food web work! So please stop by. Here is the gallery’s announcement:

“In their search for evidence of theories that better explain our physical reality, scientists often discover unexpected and beautiful phenomena. The researchers who created the images and videos included in “Experimental Space” did not have an art gallery in mind while they worked. Nevertheless, the images, figures, and data on view are aesthetically compelling and seductive. Through this exhibition, Aggregate Space Gallery and BAASICS bring scientific images and perspectives from the laboratory and the academic journal to the realm of art, where subjectivity trumps objectivity and ambiguity is more celebrated than demystification.

Featuring Evidence by: Erin Jarvis Alberstat, PhD candidate; Roger Anguera, Multimedia Engineer; Daniel J. Cohen, PhD; Sara M. Freeman, PhD; Luke Gilbert, PhD; Angela Kaczmarczyk, PhD candidate; Arnaud Martin, PhD; Brian Null, PhD, and Dr. Peter D. Roopnarine, PhD.”

Links–
http://aggregatespace.com/
http://www.baasics.com/

Science Today: Studying paleo-food webs

Tags

california academy of sciences, extinction, food webs, paleo-food web, paleontology

One of the most important ways species interact in an ecosystem? Food Webs. Learn how researchers study paleo and present-day food webs.
From the California Academy of Sciences.

Ecology and the Tragedy of the Commons

Tags

real world networks, Robustness, Scientific models, tragedy of the commons

Well, it’s been quite some time since the last post, but I’ve been busy! This post is just a short notice of a new paper, just published today. The paper is part of a special issue on the Tragedy of the Commons in the journal Sustainability. My paper takes a comparative look at the Tragedy in ecological communities and human societies, and the potential of human mutualisms for avoiding tragedies. The situation is not a very hopeful one, however, given our ever-growing human population. Hardin did note this in his original essay. Finally, this paper was inspired by an earlier paper by myself and Ken Angielczyk.

Here’s a link to the paper, as well as the abstract.

Roopnarine, P. Ecology and the Tragedy of the Commons. Sustainability 2013, 5, 749-773.

Abstract

This paper develops mathematical models of the tragedy of the commons analogous to ecological models of resource consumption. Tragedies differ fundamentally from predator–prey relationships in nature because human consumers of a resource are rarely controlled solely by that resource. Tragedies do occur, however, at the level of the ecosystem, where multiple species interactions are involved. Human resource systems are converging rapidly toward ecosystem-type systems as the number of exploited resources increase, raising the probability of system-wide tragedies in the human world. Nevertheless, common interests exclusive of exploited commons provide feasible options for avoiding tragedy in a converged world.

PNAS: Late Cretaceous restructuring of terrestrial communities facilitated the End-Cretaceous mass extinction in North America

Tags

Cretaceous, dinosaurs, extinction, food webs, mass extinction, modeling, networks, paleo-food web, paleontology, Robustness, Scientific models, simulations, Tipping point, trophic guild

That’s the title of our new paper, hot off the PNAS press. This study was a lot of fun, because it combines my food web work with one of the best known events in the fossil record. The lead author is Jonathan Mitchell, a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Jon became familiar with the food web work via Ken Angielczyk at the Field Museum, also in Chicago, a former post-doctoral researcher in my lab and close collaborator.  Jon wondered what Late Cretaceous, dinosaur-bearing communities would look like when subjected to CEG perturbations (just search this blog for info. on CEG!), and presented his results two years ago at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America. The results were so intriguing that we decided then to explore the question in much greater detail, and ask what sorts of community and ecosystem changes unfolded in the years before the Chicxulub impact, and what role they might have played in the subsequent extinctions. And here are the results! I will list the full reference below, and you can obtain a complete copy of the paper from PNAS (sorry, not open access). Also, here are links to some news websites that have covered the paper, as well as the paper’s abstract. Enjoy!

EurekAlert, Science Daily, Science Codex

Jonathan S. Mitchell, Peter D. Roopnarine, and Kenneth D. Angielczyk. Late Cretaceous restructuring of terrestrial communities facilitated the End-Cretaceous mass extinction in North America. PNAS, October 29, 2012

ABSTRACT

The sudden environmental catastrophe in the wake of the end-
Cretaceous asteroid impact had drastic effects that rippled through
animal communities. To explore how these effects may have been
exacerbated by prior ecological changes, we used a food-web
model to simulate the effects of primary productivity disruptions,
such as those predicted to result from an asteroid impact, on ten
Campanian and seven Maastrichtian terrestrial localities in North
America. Our analysis documents that a shift in trophic structure
between Campanian and Maastrichtian communities in North
America led Maastrichtian communities to experience more second-
ary extinction at lower levels of primary production shutdown and
possess a lower collapse threshold than Campanian communities.
Of particular note is the fact that changes in dinosaur richness had
a negative impact on the robustness of Maastrichtian ecosystems
against environmental perturbations. Therefore, earlier ecological
restructuring may have exacerbated the impact and severity of the
end-Cretaceous extinction, at least in North America.

The Cuban coral reef food web

Tags

biodiversity, coral reef, coral reef food web, food webs, graph, invertebrates and vertebrates, marine communities, networks, prey and predator, real world networks, sfdp

This is a rendering of the Cuban coral reef food web from our set that also includes the Cayman Islands and Jamaica. All the data will be made available very soon in an upcoming publication. This is a metanetwork, or guild-level web where nodes represent one or more species with indistinguishable prey and predator links. There is a total of 266 guilds (nodes) in the network with 3899 interactions (edges) between them. The guilds in turn encompass 860 species, including protists, macroalgae, seagrasses, invertebrates and vertebrates. Colour codes: red – primary producers; yellow – invertebrates and heterotrophic protists; magenta – vertebrates.

The web or network was rendered with Graphviz using the neato algorithm (though sfdp also produces very pleasing images). Total cpu time varied between 1-4 seconds depending on options and machine.

Biology Letters Special Feature – Models in Palaeontology

Hot off the presses! The “tragedy of the commons” paper with Ken Angielczyk is featured here, along with a truly fantastic collection of other papers. A must-read for any of you modelling-nerds out there. Oh, and the papers are free to access!

Biology Letters Special Feature – Models in Palaeontology.

Number of predators per prey after extinction I: A start

Tags

extinction, food webs, link distribution, Network theory, networks

This series of posts are inspired by two questions that Jarrett Byrnes asked:

1. Given the extinction of E predators out of N, what is the probability that a prey species will still have at least one predator remaining?
2. Given E out of N, what then is the probability that all prey species will have at least one predator remaining?

As Jarrett and I have been discovering, these are actually quite difficult questions to answer in a general manner, i.e. for all topologies of a certain size!

Say we have a two trophic level food web with N predators, what is the probability that a prey species has at least one predator remaining after the extinction of E predators? The solution provided here depends on having the out-degree of prey species, and finding the probability that all predators of a prey species become extinct as a result of E. Say that the out-degree of the prey species is , then that probability is a hypergeometric solution

which reduces to

The probability then of a prey species having at least one prey is 1 minus the above

that is, the sum of the probabilities of having 1 predator, 2 predators, etc.

Example

Let the adjacency matrix of a food web be

where predators are rows and prey are columns. Our prey out-degree set is therefore {3, 2}. For E=1, both prey will have at least one predator since their out-degrees both exceed 1. For E=2, the possible resulting topologies are

For s=2

This is correct since our prey species of out-degree 2 (second column of A) has at least one predator in two of our three post-extinction topologies. The probability should be zero for s=3 (since E<s). If we add a third prey species, with s=1, making

then for E=1, the post-extinction topologies are

The probability that this third species has at least one prey is also 2/3.

A further example

So far so good, right? Well, Jarrett posed this example,

Notice that we now have two prey of out-degree 2. For E=1, the post-extinction topologies are

Applying the above formula yields

which is correct, since two of the three topologies maintain at least one predator for each prey. When E=2, the topologies become

Obviously, . But the formula gives

What went wrong?! The answer points to just how devilish the questions are, and how deceptive! There are two species of out-degree 2 (s=2) in the food web, hence the second term in the formula is squared (see above). BUT, the predator-prey topologies of the species are different, meaning that simple hypergeometric counting cannot work. We literally must list and examine all the post-extinction topologies, but this is prohibitively impractical for food webs and networks of even modest size (a dozen species). So there we stand. We currently have a partial solution, and I will explore the difficulty and the partial solution in the next post.