Factors Determining Nestedness in Complex Networks Johnson, Samuel Domínguez-García, Virginia Muñoz Martínez, Miguel Ángel Biodiversity Calculators Community ecology Complex systems Ecosystems Scale-free networks Theoretical ecology Topology Understanding the causes and effects of network structural features is a key task in deciphering complex systems. In this context, the property of network nestedness has aroused a fair amount of interest as regards ecological networks. Indeed, Bastolla et al. introduced a simple measure of network nestedness which opened the door to analytical understanding, allowing them to conclude that biodiversity is strongly enhanced in highly nested mutualistic networks. Here, we suggest a slightly refined version of such a measure of nestedness and study how it is influenced by the most basic structural properties of networks, such as degree distribution and degree-degree correlations (i.e. assortativity). We find that most of the empirically found nestedness stems from heterogeneity in the degree distribution. Once such an influence has been discounted – as a second factor – we find that nestedness is strongly correlated with disassortativity and hence – as random networks have been recently found to be naturally disassortative – they also tend to be naturally nested just as the result of chance. 2014-03-26T09:33:24Z 2014-03-26T09:33:24Z 2013 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Jonhson, S.; Domínguez-García, V.; Muñoz, M.A. Factors Determining Nestedness in Complex Networks. Plos One, 8(9): e74025 (2013). [http://hdl.handle.net/10481/31118] 1932-6203 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0074025 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/31118 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License Public Library of Science (PLOS)