Global patterns of mainland and insular pollination networks

Traveset, Anna; Tur, Cristina; Trøjelsgaard, Kristian; Heleno, Rúben; Castro‐Urgal, Rocío; Olesen, Jens M.

doi:10.1111/geb.12362

Cited by 95 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Nevertheless, our simulation model suggests a high robustness of plants to animal extinction in future communities. This is consistent with the finding that mutualistic networks on islands generally lack a high diversity of animal pollinators and seed dispersers, but apparently maintain their pivotal functions to plants2829. In natural communities, the tolerance of plants to the loss of their mutualistic animal partners is further increased because many plant taxa can locally persist for extended time periods25.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change

et al. 2016

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Impacts of climate change on individual species are increasingly well documented, but we lack understanding of how these effects propagate through ecological communities. Here we combine species distribution models with ecological network analyses to test potential impacts of climate change on >700 plant and animal species in pollination and seed-dispersal networks from central Europe. We discover that animal species that interact with a low diversity of plant species have narrow climatic niches and are most vulnerable to climate change. In contrast, biotic specialization of plants is not related to climatic niche breadth and vulnerability. A simulation model incorporating different scenarios of species coextinction and capacities for partner switches shows that projected plant extinctions under climate change are more likely to trigger animal coextinctions than vice versa. This result demonstrates that impacts of climate change on biodiversity can be amplified via extinction cascades from plants to animals in ecological networks.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change

et al. 2016

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“…Studies on biotic interactions have often found common network structures within ecological communities, such as nested and modular patterns (Olesen, Bascompte, Dupont, & Jordano, ; Thébault & Fontaine, ). Some of these structures have been confirmed by global studies conducted on mutualistic systems such as plant–pollinators (Traveset et al., ), suggesting that biotic interactions at the community level may be structured following general rules. Our analyses indicate that perennial plant communities in drylands world‐wide present common structures, such as the presence of frequent spatial associations between species and (less commonly) different types of vegetation patches.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

The structure of plant spatial association networks is linked to plant diversity in global drylands

et al. 2018

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1. Despite commonly used to unveil the complex structure of interactions within ecological communities and their value to assess their resilience against external disturbances, network analyses have seldom been applied in plant communities. We evaluated how plant-plant spatial association networks vary in global drylands, and assessed whether network structure was related to plant diversity in these ecosystems. 2. We surveyed 185 dryland ecosystems from all continents except Antarctica and built networks using the local spatial association between all the perennial plants species present in the communities studied. Then, for each network we calculated four descriptors of network structure (link density, link weight mean and heterogeneity, and structural balance), and evaluated their significance with null models. Finally, we used structural equation models to evaluate how abiotic factors (including geography, topography, climate and soil conditions) and network descriptors influenced plant species richness and evenness. 3. Plant networks were highly variable worldwide, but at most study sites (72%) presented common structures such as a higher link density than expected. We also find evidence of the presence of high structural balance in the networks studied. Moreover, all network descriptors considered had a positive and significant effect on plant diversity, and on species richness in particular. . Our results constitute the first empirical evidence showing the existence of common network architectures structuring dryland plant communities at the global scale, and suggest a relationship between the structure of spatial networks and plant diversity. They also highlight the importance of system-level approaches to explain the diversity and structure of interactions in plant communities, two major drivers of terrestrial ecosystem functioning.

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“…B 284: 20162218 richness, among-species competition may nonetheless have promoted high niche partitioning and thus limited the niche width of each species. By contrast, on oceanic islands with low species richness, pollinators presumably expand their floral niches in terms of the number of interaction partners [60][61][62]. This discrepancy may be due to our focus on functional diversity rather than species richness.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Low functional diversity promotes niche changes in natural island pollinator communities

Hiraiwa¹,

Ushimaru²

2017

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Functional diversity loss among pollinators has rapidly progressed across the globe and is expected to influence plant-pollinator interactions in natural communities. Although recent findings suggest that the disappearance of a certain pollinator functional group may cause niche expansions and/or shifts in other groups, no study has examined this prediction in natural communities with high plant and pollinator diversities. By comparing coastal pollination networks on continental and oceanic islands, we examined how community-level flower visit patterns are influenced by the relative biomass of long-tongued pollinators (RBLP). We found that RBLP significantly correlated with pollinator functional diversity and was lower in oceanic than in continental islands. Pollinator niches shifted with decreasing RBLP, such that diverse species with various proboscis lengths, especially shorttongued species, increasingly visited long-tubed flowers. However, we found no conspicuous negative impacts of low RBLP and the consequent niche shifts on pollinator visit frequencies to flowers in oceanic island communities. Notably, fruit set significantly decreased as RBLP decreased in a study plant species. These results suggest that niche shifts by other functional groups can generally compensate for a decline in long-tongued pollinators in natural communities, but there may be negative impacts on plant reproduction.

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Global patterns of mainland and insular pollination networks

Cited by 95 publications

References 49 publications

Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change

Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change

The structure of plant spatial association networks is linked to plant diversity in global drylands

Low functional diversity promotes niche changes in natural island pollinator communities

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