Fig. 3

Phylogenetic patterns are embedded in plant–animal interaction networks and can influence their coevolution. The interaction pattern can be described as a presence–absence matrix denoting the observed and unobserved interactions (as shown here) or a quantitative matrix with data on interaction strength for each observed pairwise interaction. How each species interacts can be affected its evolutionary history (phenotypic traits; a). For example, closely related species might have a similar pattern of interaction, simply because of niche conservatism (Rezende et al. 2007). Besides, the interaction pattern itself can be subject to the effect of both the animal and plant phylogenetic histories (b), with a marked trend for the interactions to match the phylogenetic history of the two groups (b, top), one of them (the plants in this case; b, middle) or none (b, bottom) Jordano and Bascompte, in prep