# Extinction-induced community reorganization in bipartite networks

## TL;DR

This study investigates how extinction events impact the community structure of bipartite mutualistic networks, revealing increased modularity and community reorganization, which may offer ecosystem protection.

## Contribution

It introduces a dynamic analysis of community reorganization in bipartite networks under various extinction scenarios, combining real data and network modeling.

## Key findings

- Extinction events increase network modularity.
- Species persistence decreases rapidly with more extinctions.
- Network reorganization may protect remaining ecosystems.

## Abstract

We study how the community structure of bipartite mutualistic networks changes in a dynamic context. First, we consider a real mutualistic network and introduce extinction events according to several scenarios. We model extinctions as node or interaction removals. For node removal, we consider random, directed and sequential extinctions; for interaction removal, we consider random extinctions. The bipartite network reorganizes showing an increase of the effective modularity and a fast decrease of the persistence of the species in the original communities with increasing number of extinction events. Second, we compare extinctions in a real mutualistic network with the growth of a bipartite network model. The modularity reaches a stationary value and nodes remain in the same community after joining the network. Our results show that perturbations and disruptive events affect the connectivity pattern of mutualistic networks at the mesoscale level. The increase of the effective modularity observed in some scenarios could provide some protection to the remaining ecosystem.