USING NETWORK ANALYSIS TO CHARACTERIZE FOREST STRUCTURE

Abstract. Network analysis quantifies different struc-tural properties of systems of interrelated parts using a sin-gle analytical framework. Many ecological phenomena have network-like properties, such as the trophic relationships of food webs, geographic structure of metapopulations, and species interactions in communities. Therefore, our ability to understand and manage such systems may benefit from the use of network-analysis techniques. But network analysis has not been applied extensively to ecological problems and its suit-ability for ecological studies is uncertain. Here, we investigate the ability of network analysis to detect spatial patterns of species association in a tropical forest. We use three common graph-theoretic measures of network structure to quantify the effect of understory tree size on the spatial association of understory species with trees in the canopy: the node de