Untangling the seasonal dynamics of plant-pollinator communities

Abstract

Ecological communities often show changes in populations and their interactions over time. To date, however, it has been challenging to effectively untangle the mechanisms shaping such dynamics. One approach that has yet to be fully explored is to treat the varying structure of empirical communities-i.e. their network of interactions-as time series. Here, we follow this approach by applying a network-comparison technique to study the seasonal dynamics of plant-pollinator networks. We find that the structure of these networks is extremely variable, where species constantly change how they interact with each other within seasons. Most importantly, we find the holistic dynamic of plants and pollinators to be remarkably coherent across years, allowing us to reveal general rules by which species first enter, then change their roles, and finally leave the networks. Overall, our results disentangle key aspects of species' interaction turnover, phenology, and seasonal assembly/disassembly processes in empirical plant-pollinator communities.

Seeing through the static: the temporal dimension of plant–animal mutualistic interactions

“…presence of an invader or a novel resource; Valdovinos et al ., 2009; Kaiser‐Bunbury et al ., 2010; Arroyo‐Correa et al ., 2020); assessing how the network roles of individual species change through time (e.g. Cirtwill et al ., 2018; Bramon Mora et al ., 2020); quantifying the temporal persistence of species, their interactions and structural components of networks (e.g. Bramon Mora et al ., 2018; Chacoff et al ., 2018), and linking temporal flexibility and interaction reorganisation to network structural stability (e.g.…”

High variation in handling times confers 35-year stability to predator feeding rates despite altered prey abundances and apparent diet proportions

“…Feeding rates may be far less changing than inferred by surveys of apparent diets and community structure alone. As such, an improved understanding of detection times will not only be relevant to historical resurveys and other temporal analyses of community and interaction-network structure (Bramon Mora et al ., 2020), but will also be relevant to studies describing biogeographic patterns in these to infer how communities function (Bartley et al ., 2019; Tylianakis & Morris, 2017).…”

Mapping trait versus species turnover reveals spatiotemporal variation in functional redundancy in a plant-pollinator network

“…Although commonly assumed in stepwise-extinction approaches (e.g. Classen et al ., 2020; Keyes et al ., 2021), this is unlikely in real communities (Brosi & Briggs, 2013; Bramon Mora et al ., 2020). However, the lack of plant functional-trait data precluded predictions about which individuals would be sufficiently compatible in their traits to predict rewiring.…”

“…Consequently, our understanding of plant-pollinator network lability at localised geographical scales and over short time frames remains limited. We must thus move beyond viewing plant-pollinator networks as geographically or seasonally static entities (Trøjelsgaard & Olesen, 2016; Tylianakis & Morris, 2017; Bramon Mora et al, 2020), and understand how species versus functional traits spatiotemporally turn over in localised communities (Robroek et al ., 2017). In doing so, we can resolve the contribution of functional traits to network structure and robustness to perturbation.…”