Mycorrhizal network assembly in a community context: The presence of neighbours matters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding the factors and mechanisms driving the structure of ecological networks is a challenge for community ecologists. Notably, it remains unclear whether observed interaction patterns between two trophic groups are a result of (a) preferential partner selection between groups, or (b) species interactions within groups. We conducted an experiment in order to disentangle these two drivers, using the plant–mycorrhizal symbiosis as a model system. We followed mycorrhizal colonization of plant roots growing either with or without neighbours. This allowed us to assess the relative importance of interaction within trophic groups (here, plant‐to‐plant interactions) on ecological network assembly. Results showed that plants were not equally affected by the presence of neighbours and that network nestedness was higher when plants grew without neighbours. We also found a poor correlation between the centrality (i.e., standardized number of interactions) of plant species grown in communities and those grown without neighbours, while the reverse was true for mycorrhizal fungi. This suggests that the optimum level of specificity or generalism in mycorrhizal selection is not a fixed plant trait, but a plastic, context‐dependent one. Synthesis. Our results show that ecological networks are not only shaped by preferential partner selection, but also by interactions within a given trophic group. This finding should be considered in future modelling exercises on ecological network dynamics. Moreover, our nestedness results suggest that in the presence of multiple host plants, mycorrhizal fungi display preferences for specific interactions, suggesting that local plant diversity may shape mycorrhizal fungal community structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".