Fig. 5: Increasing mutualism affects diversity and persistence.

Colors represent guilds of species described in Fig. 2 and Table 1. Initial diversity (S) on the x-axis and in (a) describes the initial number of species in food webs plus added herbivores and omnivores in the Food Web (FW) treatments or pollinators in the multiplex treatments. Increasing S corresponds both to an increasing number of added (+) animals and to an increasing fraction of the 20 plants without pollinators that are assigned to be plants with pollinators, and thus to increasing prevalence of mutualism in multiplex treatments. Bars show mean values for networks of a given S in increments of two species. Stacked bar graphs show the mean number of species in each guild (colors) that contribute to a initial or b final ecosystem diversity. Persistence, the fraction of the initial diversity that persists to the end of the simulations, is shown for c the entire ecosystem (i.e. network of species) and d−h for each guild of animals. c Error bars show standard deviations. d−h µ is the mean guild persistence over all N = 24,276 simulations in each treatment. Plants nearly always persist in our treatments (Supplementary Fig. 3), so their persistence is not shown.