Pollinator interaction flexibility across scales affects patch colonization and occupancy.

Abstract

Global change alters ecological communities and may disrupt ecological interactions and the provision of ecosystem functions. As ecological communities respond to global change, species may either go locally extinct or form novel interactions. To date, few studies have assessed how flexible species are in their interaction patterns, mainly due to the scarcity of data spanning long time series. Using a ten-year species-level dataset on the assembly of mutualistic networks from the Central Valley in California, we test whether interaction flexibility affects pollinators' colonization and persistence and their resulting habitat occupancy in a highly modified landscape. We propose three metrics of interaction flexibility associated with different scales of organization within ecological communities and explore which species' traits affect them. Our results provide empirical evidence linking species' ability to colonize habitat patches across a landscape to the role they play in networks. Phenological breadth and body size had contrasting effects on interaction flexibility. We demonstrate the relationship between mutualistic networks and species' ability to colonize and persist in the landscape, suggesting interaction flexibility as a potential mechanism for communities to maintain ecosystem function despite changes in community composition.