Welcome!

With interactions at its core, either among organisms or between organisms and abiotic factors, ecology is inherently a relational science. Because of this, ecological systems are very naturally and effectively approached using network analysis.

Exploring the range of ecological networks from the interactions among plants and pollinating insects to marine food-webs, this workshop will introduce the basics of network theory and introduce users through hands-on exercises to multiple tools for conducting network analysis.

All you'll need to bring is a laptop that can access the internet and has R installed on it. For more information on R and how to install on your system, please go to https://cran.r-project.org.

Road-Map

12 - 12:10 — Introductions (Lau)

12:15 - 1 pm — Intro to Network (Borrett)

1 - 1:30 pm — Model Construction — with emphasis on ecosystem models

1:30 - 1:45 — Break 1 — (Lau and Borrett help any students who need it get R and enaR and bipartite and iGraph installed)

1:45 - 2:45 — Bipartite Network Analysis [with R] (Lau) — Two-mode network analysis using nestedness and modularity, also including ~10 intro to R.

2:45 - 3:00 pm — Break 2

3:00 - 3:50 pm — Intro to ENA with enaR (Borrett, Lau, and Whipple)

4:00 - 4:55 pm — EcoNet — ENA, Dynamic Models, other new analyses. (Caner)

4:55 - 5 pm — Summary and Wrap up. (Lau)

Readings

Of the huge body of network science and its applications to ecology, we selected a few papers that would be great to read before coming to class:

Borrett, S.R., J. Moody, A. Edelmann. 2014. The rise of Network Ecology: Maps of the topic diversity and scientific collaboration. Ecological Modelling 293: 111–127.

Brandes U., Robins G., Mccranie A., Wasserman S. 2013. What is network science?. Network Science, 1, pp 1-15. doi:10.1017/nws.2013.2.

Fath, B.D., Scharler, U.M., Ulanowicz, R.E., Hannon, B. 2007. Ecological network analysis: network construction. Ecological Modelling 208:48-55.

Kazanci, C. (2008) What is EcoNet?

Fortuna, M. A., Stouffer, D. B., Olesen, J. M., Jordano, P., Mouillot, D., Krasnov, B. R., Poulin, R. and Bascompte, J. (2010), Nestedness versus modularity in ecological networks: two sides of the same coin?. Journal of Animal Ecology, 79: 811–817.

Borrett, S. R., Lau, M. K. (2014), enaR: An r package for Ecosystem Network Analysis. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 5: 1206–1213.

Here's a list (click here) of more references that will be cited and discussed.

Software

bipartite, enaR, iGraph, and EcoNet

Contributors

Stuart Borett (UNC Wilmington)

Matt Lau (Harvard Forest)

Caner Kazanci (University of Georgia)

Stuart Whipple (University of Georgia)