A0826
Title: Quantifying biodiversity from network perspectives
Authors: Wei-chung Liu - Academia Sinica (Taiwan) [presenting]
Abstract: Biodiversity traditionally concerns the number of species and their genomic diversity in an ecosystem. Since species are linked trophically in an ecosystem, it is argued that biodiversity can also be viewed from a network perspective regarding the diversity of their interaction patterns. Three approaches are proposed. The first is based on the notion of regular equivalence, measuring the similarity between species positions in an ecological network; the second is based on the concept of positional centrality, where diversity is defined in terms of how diverse species centrality values are in an ecological network. Third is based on the ecological concept of direct and indirect interactions, and diversity here extends from how similarly two species affect all individual species in the same network. Then the linkage is investigated between those three biodiversity measures, various structural properties of an ecological network, and some species traits. The discussion then focuses on the future development of this particular field of network research in ecology.
