Figure 2: Secondary animal and plant extinction under climate change.
From: Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change
Shown are (a,b) secondary animal extinction in response to plant extinction and (c,d) secondary plant extinction in response to animal extinction for a seed-dispersal network from Białowieża forest (network ID=S1; 12 plant and 29 bird species). (a,c) Species (rectangles in red (animals) and blue (plants), connected by weighted interaction links; box and line width correspond to interaction frequencies) are removed sequentially according to projected suitability changes in climatic conditions. Low ranks (light shade) correspond to a high vulnerability to climate change, high ranks (dark shade) correspond to a low vulnerability; thus, light links are prone to extinction, whereas dark links are the persisting backbone of interactions under climate change. The corresponding secondary extinction plots (b) for animals (red) and (d) plants (blue) show network sensitivity to species extinction (filled area above the extinction curve) under four scenarios of species’ flexibility (solid to dotted lines) to reallocate interactions to persisting partners (constrained rewiring); here secondary extinction is triggered after 50% interaction loss. In this network, sensitivity to plant extinction (red area) was larger than sensitivity to animal extinction (blue area), that is, animal species went more quickly secondarily extinct than plant species. Secondary extinction plots for the 12 other interaction networks are shown in Supplementary Fig. 1.
