Ecological Networks in Changing Tropics

Earth has an extremely dynamic surface which changes naturally across time. In the last century, however, vegetation cover underwent severe modifications due to human demands for natural resources and food production. These changes are deeply modifying the spatial distribution of native environments, which exist today mostly in small patches embedded in human dominated landscapes. This is even harsher in the tropics, where agricultural expansion is more intense. Ecologically, this means that native species have to cope with a heterogeneous set of new environments in which they did not evolve, bringing difficulties for the movement of foraging individuals. This can impair the encounters needed to establish biological interactions among individuals and different species. In this chapter, we explore how landscape changes can lead to variations in ecological networks structure and its consequences for biological and ecosystem services conservation. Although there is a general lack of complete and extensive studies regarding the effects of landscape changes on tropical ecological networks, there is growing evidence that, given a certain native vegetation cover, landscape heterogeneity may favor bigger and more complex networks across scales or ecological hierarchical levels. The relationship between landscape heterogeneity and the structure of ecological networks is however still an open field with many challenges and opportunities and a huge potential for application for conservation and environmental management.