Evolutionary history as a driver of ecological networks: a case study of plant-hummingbird interactions

Multiple factors drive species interactions in ecological networks, such as morphological barriers, spatio-temporal distribution, abundances and evolutionary histories of species. Novel methods are making it possible to evaluate the relative importance of each of these drivers. However, the lack of appropriate methods has prevented evaluating the extent to which interaction networks are shaped by species’ evolutionary histories. This study includes the evolutionary histories of species among the potential drivers of interactions, allowing the comparative analysis of its importance in structuring ecological networks. We hypothesized different possible phylogenetic scenarios to predict frequencies of interactions between species by combining concepts from the fields of ecological networks and ecophylogenetics. The usage of these scenarios is illustrated in a plant-hummingbird interaction network database from the Atlantic Forest, southeastern Brazil. We first evaluated which phylogenetic ...