Ecological networks in managed ecosystems: Connecting structure to services

Introduction Ecological networks represent a cornerstone of ecology: they describe and evaluate the links between form and function in multispecies systems, such as food-web structure and dynamics, and they connect different scales and levels of biological organization (Moore and de Ruiter, 2012; Wall et al., 2015). These properties of being able to elucidate both the structure within complex systems and their scaling indicate that ecological networks and network theory could be widely applied to practical problems, including management decision-making processes such as the design of nature reserves and the preservation of ecosystem services. While the study of networks – initially food-web…