Species motif participation provides unique information about species risk of extinction

Loss of species in food webs can set in motion a cascade of additional (secondary) extinctions. A species' position in a food web (e.g. its trophic level or number of interactions) is known to affect its ability to persist following disturbance. These simple measures, however, offer only a coarse description of how species fit into their community. One would therefore expect that more detailed structural measures such as participation in three-species motifs (meso-scale structures which provide information on a species' direct and indirect interactions) will also be related to probability of persistence. Disturbances affecting the basal resources have particularly strong effects on the rest of the food web. However, how disturbances branch out and affect consumer persistence depends on the structural pattern of species interactions in several steps. The magnitude, for example, the proportion of basal resources lost, will likely also affect the outcome. Here, we analyse whether a consumer's risk of secondary extinction after the removal of basal resources depends on the consumer's motif participation and how this relationship varies with the severity of disturbance. We show that consumer species which participate more frequently in the direct competition motif and less frequently in the omnivory motif generally have higher probability of persistence following disturbance to basal resources. However, both the strength of the disturbance and the overall network structure (i.e. connectance) affect the strength and direction of relationships between motif participation and persistence. Motif participation therefore captures important trends in species persistence and provides a rich description of species' structural roles in their communities, but must be considered in the context of network structure as a whole and of the specific disturbance applied.