Data from: 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
hypotheses better predict the observed network; subsequently, we evaluated
the relative importance of species evolutionary histories, abundances, and
matching on species morphologies and phenologies as drivers of their
frequencies of interactions. The results suggest that the evolutionary
histories of hummingbirds are more important than the species abundances
in structuring the studied plant-hummingbird network but less important
than the morphological and phenological matching among species. The
approach developed here offers the potential to advance our understanding
of the multiple factors structuring ecological networks.