Experimental environmental change and mutualistic vs. antagonistic plant flower–visitor interactions

The influence of spatial sampling scales on ant–plant interaction network architecture

“…On the contrary, the higher species turnover across larger scales (between plots) may explain the greater variation in network structure at the regional scale. It is therefore expected that, for other organism groups like pollinators and seed dispersers, the ability to move over longer distances and the size of their living area could determine the larger spatial sampling scale at which network structure becomes constant (see Burkle & Knight, ; Carstensen et al., ; Parsche, Fründ, & Tscharntke, ). For example, in a few square metres, one can find a highly diverse interactive community of ants and plants.…”

Landscape alteration and habitat modification: impacts on plant–pollinator systems

“…Finally, recent theoretical and empirical modelling work suggests that if environmental stresses reach a certain level, then individual bee colonies/populations and even inherently robust pollinator community networks could collapse [50 ,55]. As pollinators face multiple anthropogenic threats [7 ,8], a potential risk is that this multiplicity of stresses may increase the probability of such sudden population or community collapse, although there have been few experimental tests of this to date [38,56].…”

“…Sociality is another trait affecting vulnerability to landscape alteration. Social bees are central location foragers tied to the colony location, consequently they are more sensitive to the distance to forage resource patches in the surrounding landscape [20 ,38] than nonsocial insects with free-living progeny, such as Diptera [38,39 ]. Even within social bee taxa, species-specific differences in mobility and dispersal range will govern responses to habitat loss and/or fragmentation.…”

Evolutionary Biology: Biodiversification from Genotype to Phenotype

“…Thus, under changes driven by human activities, we expect changes in pollinator-mediated selection on floral traits. Incipient but consistent evidence indicates that human disturbances affect the composition of pollinator assemblages, their visitation rates to flowers, and/or their foraging behavior and efficiency (e.g., Aguilar et al 2006;González-Varo et al 2009;Parsche et al 2011). For most flowering plants, such changes will have direct effects on their mating patterns (Aguilar et al 2008), which may trigger the development of novel reproductive strategies to cope with new scenarios, which in turn may influence the evolution of floral traits.…”