mangal - making sense of biotic interaction data

By

Poisot, Timothée
Gravel, Dominique
Vissault, Steve

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2017-8-3

Original Publication

Metabarcoding and metagenomics

Volume

1

Pages

1--2

Subjects

API , Biotic interactions

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers 2017-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/tdwgproceedings.1.19993

 

Abstract

There are exponentially more species interactions than there are species - and this should entice us to be exponentially more careful when designing a data format to represent species interactions. The tradition in the analysis of species interaction networks was to store matrices, but this format is inefficient, does not offer access to the information in a modular and atomic way, and is poor in meta-data. To help research, faciltiate interaction with other biodiversity data representations, and offer a universal, unified format to represent biotic interactions, we designed mangal.io. At its core, the mangal data format specificies how various component of an interaction should be represented, and the hierarchy between them. In this presentation, we will (i) describe the original data format and explain how it was designed based on ecological principles, (ii) describe the revised data format and why it can function as the standard for biotic interaction data, and (iii) illustrate case studies based on the use of mangal.io, notably related to using AI/machine learning to infer missing biotic interactions and the macroecology of food webs