Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the authors who have contributed to this special issue and also to Prof. Burt Kotler and Prof. Leon Blaustein for inviting us to edit this special issue dedicated to networks in ecology. This invitation followed the 6th SIDEER (Swiss Institute for Dryland Enviormental & Energy Research) graduate symposium, held at the Sede Boqer campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev on March 2014, titled “Exploring real-world networks”. We wish to thank our fellow symposium organizers – Avshalom Babad, Asaf Chen, Amber Hill and Noam Reshef – and to thank Marco Scotti and Bernd Blasius for leading the symposium talks. We would also like to thank Prof. Boris Zaltzman, director of SIDEER at the time, to the Blaustien Center for Scientific Cooperation (BCSC) fund for providing financial support for the symposium, and to Ella Nicolaevsky for logistic support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.