Beyond species: why ecological interaction networks vary through space and time

Community ecology is tasked with the considerable challenge of predicting the struc15 ture, and properties, of emerging ecosystems. It requires the ability to understand how andwhy 16 species interact, as this will allow the development of mechanism-based predictive models, and 17 1 . CC-BY 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/001677 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 3, 2014; as such to better characterize how ecological mechanisms act locally on the existence of inter1 specific interactions. Here we argue that the current conceptualization of species interaction 2 networks is ill-suited for this task. Instead, we propose that future research must start to ac3 count for the intrinsic variability of species interactions, then scale up from here onto complex 4 networks. This can be accomplished simply by recognizing that there exists intra-specific vari5 ability, in traits or properties related to the establishment of species interactions. By shifting 6 the scale towards population-based processes, we show that this new approach will improve 7 our predictive ability and mechanistic understanding of how species interact over large spatial 8 or temporal scales. 9 2 . CC-BY 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/001677 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 3, 2014;