Quantifying the Increase in Biodiversity Supported by Mutualistic Networks

Plant-animal mutualistic networks have a distinct nested organization, with a core of reciprocal generalist species and a tail of specialists interacting asymmetrically with the most generalist species. Here we extend competition theory to analytically quantify the increase of biodiversity supported by nested mutualistic networks. We test our predictions with a dataset of 56 mutualistic networks. Our results show that the nested structure of mutualistic networks enhances species biodiversity through a reduction in effective interspecific competition. Nested mutualistic networks can thus be viewed as the architecture of biodiversity.

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