Applications and Future Directions
Given the increasing availability of temporal abundance measurements, the robust EMtree approach we use here will likely be a valuable tool in the future to further disentangle species interaction networks. In particular, since it has been suggested that food webs rewire in predictable ways due to climate change (Bartley et al. 2019), this method may be used to investigate how interaction networks rewire in response to climate change. Moreover, since it is widely recognized that interactions are the architecture of biodiversity (Bascompte & Jordano 2007), the maintenance of these interactions, even those that are seasonal, is a necessity to maintain current ecosystem stability. In this regard, the approach we adopted for our analysis could be valuable for conservation as it can be used to detect key biological relationships that must be retained for species to avoid extinction.
Future studies should seek to quantify the degree of temporal rewiring and species turnover, and the conditions under which these processes become the dominant topological change to communities. While species rewiring was dominant in our study, the processes which drive topological changes are context dependent, even for similar study systems. For example, changes in plant-pollinator networks have been attributed to both temporal species turnover and rewiring in some cases (Alarcón et al. 2008; Petanidou et al. 2008; Olesenet al. 2011), and in other cases, the majority of changes were attributed to rapid rewiring (CaraDonna et al. 2017). Nonetheless, given the potential implications of rewiring on stability, and robustness of network structure, we strongly advocate for its continued study to determine when and where temporal rewiring and species turnover are dominant.