Bioenergetic approaches have been greatly influential for understanding community functioning and stability and predicting effects of environmental changes on biodiversity. These approaches use allometric relationships to establish species' trophic interactions and consumption rates, and have been most successfully applied to aquatic ecosystems. Terrestrial ecosystems, where body mass is less predictive of plant-consumer interactions, present inherent challenges that these models have yet to meet. Here, we review the literature on the processes governing terrestrial plant-consumer interactions and develop a bioenergetic framework integrating those processes.Our framework integrates for the first-time bioenergetics specific to terrestrial plants and their consumers within a food-web approach that also considers mutualistic interactions, advancing understanding of terrestrial food webs and predictions of their responses to environmental changes.
Invasive plants often use mutualisms to establish in their new habitats and tend to be visited by resident pollinators similarly or more frequently than native plants. The quality and resulting reproductive success of those visits, however, have rarely been studied in a network context. Here, we use a dynamic model to evaluate the invasion success and impacts on natives of various types of non-native plant species introduced into thousands of plant-pollinator networks of varying structure. We found that network structure properties did not predict invasion success, but non-native traits and interactions did. Specifically, non-native plants producing high amounts of floral rewards but visited by few pollinators at the moment of their introduction were the only plant species able to invade the networks. This result is determined by the transient dynamics occurring right after the plant introduction. Successful invasions increased the abundance of pollinators that visited the invader, but the reallocation of the pollinators' foraging effort from native plants to the invader reduced the quantity and quality of visits received by native plants and made the networks slightly more modular and nested. The positive and negative effects of the invader on pollinator and plant abundance, respectively, were buffered by plant richness. Our results call for evaluating the impact of invasive plants not only on visitation rates and network structure, but also on processes beyond pollination including seed production and recruitment of native plants.
Invasive plants often use mutualisms to establish and spread in their new habitats. These plants tend to be well-integrated into plant-pollinator networks in terms of being visited by resident pollinators similarly or more frequently than the native plants. The long-term persistence of non-native plants, however, not only depends on the quantity of visits they receive but also on the visit quality and the resulting reproductive success, which have been rarely studied in a network context. We evaluated the potential of non-native plants to invade and impact plant-pollinator networks based on their ability to attract pollinators via production of floral rewards, to produce and attach pollen on pollinators, and the consequent seed production and population growth. We simulated the introduction of different types of non-native plants into thousands of different networks using a model that includes population dynamics of plants and pollinators, quantity and quality of pollinator visits, the dynamics of floral rewards, and pollinator adaptive foraging. We found the counterintuitive result that introduced plants visited by fewer pollinators were more successful at securing the high-quality visits necessary to invade. These plants did not experience the depletion of floral rewards that plants visited by too many pollinators experienced, which caused pollinators to reassign their visits to other plants and, therefore, dilute the conspecific pollen they carried. Native pollinators increased their abundance with the plant invasions, but the reallocated foraging effort concentrated on invaders reduced the quantity and quality of visits to native plants and made the visitation networks more modular and nested. These effects were buffered by plant richness. Interestingly, the significant changes in visitation structure only caused a minimal decline in native plant abundance and no extinctions. Our results call for evaluating the impact of invasive plants not only on visitation rates and network structure, but also on the demographics of native plants, which depend on other processes beyond pollination including seed production and recruitment.
Plant-pollinator mutualisms contribute to biodiversity and ecosystem function. Invasive species, however, can alter the structure and function of plant-pollinator mutualisms. Illuminating how restoration affects plant-pollinator mutualisms can provide insights into how mutualistic communities assemble and can inform management. We investigated how removing invasive barbed goatgrass (Aegilops triuncialis) influenced the diversity, abundance, and structure of plant-pollinator interactions in a California serpentine meadow. Goatgrass removal treatments resulted in decreased goatgrass cover and increased native forb cover compared to the control treatment. Restored plots had increased pollinator morphospecies richness, Shannon diversity, and pollinator abundance across all years. The restored network had a less nested structure than the control network. Plant-pollinator networks for the restored treatments had higher mean numbers of shared plant partners among pollinators and higher pollinator niche overlap relative to the control. The native forb goldfields (Lasthenia californica) acted as a generalist hub for pollinators within the networks, contributing more strongly to network nestedness in the restored treatment relative to the control. Overall, we found that removing invasive goatgrass increased pollinator diversity and abundance, resulting in higher niche overlap among pollinators visiting a generalist wildflower species. Network-based approaches can inform the restoration of plant-pollinator mutualisms, while providing insights into how mutualistic communities respond to invasive species.
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