  Network ecologists investigate the structure, function, and evolution of
ecological systems using network models and analyses. For example, network
techniques have been used to study community interactions (i.e., food-webs,
mutualisms), gene flow across landscapes, and the sociality of individuals in
populations. The work presented here uses a bibliographic and network approach
to (1) document the rise of Network Ecology, (2) identify the diversity of
topics addressed in the field, and (3) map the structure of scientific
collaboration among contributing scientists. Our aim is to provide a broad
overview of this emergent field that highlights its diversity and to provide a
foundation for future advances. To do this, we searched the ISI Web of Science
database for ecology publications between 1900 and 2012 using the search terms
for research areas of Environmental Sciences & Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
and the topic tag ecology. From these records we identified the Network Ecology
publications using the topic terms network, graph theory, and web while
controlling for the usage of misleading phrases. The resulting corpus entailed
29,513 publications between 1936 and 2012. We document the rapid rise in
Network Ecology publications per year reaching a magnitude of over 5% of the
ecological publications in 2012. Drawing topical information from the
publication record content (titles, abstracts, keywords) and collaboration
information from author listing, our analysis highlights the diversity and
clustering of topics addressed within Network Ecology and reveals the highly
collaborative approach of scientists publishing in this field. We conclude that
Network Ecology is a large and rapidly growing area of ecology, and we expect
continued growth of this research field.
