Abstract
Plant-pollinator networks have been repeatedly reported as cumulative ones that are described with >1 years observations. However, such cumulative networks are composed of pairwise interactions recorded at different periods, and thus may not be able to reflect the reality of species interactions in nature (e.g., early-flowering plants typically do not compete for shared pollinators with late-flowering plants, but they are assumed to do so in accumulated networks). Here, we examine the monthly sampling structure of an alpine plant-pollinator bipartite network over a two-year period to determine whether relative species abundance and species traits better explain the network structure of monthly networks than yearly ones. Although community composition and species abundance varied from one month to another, the monthly networks (as well as the yearly networks described with annual pooled data) had a highly nested structure, in which specialists directly interact with generalist partners. Moreover, relative species abundance predicted the nestedness in both the monthly and yearly networks and accounted for a statistically significant percentage of the variation (i.e., 20%-44%) in the pairwise interactions of monthly networks, but not yearly networks. The combination of relative species abundance and species traits (but not species traits only) showed a similar prediction power in terms of both network nestedness and pairwise interaction frequencies. Considering the previously recognized structural pattern and associated mechanisms of plant-pollinator networks, we propose that relative species abundance may be an important factor influencing both nestedness and interaction frequency of pollination networks.
Highlights
In theory, every species within a biological community can directly or indirectly interact with every other species to form a complex ecological network
Because variation in species composition is not necessarily consistent between plants and pollinators, relative species abundance has been frequently suggested to be responsible for the nested structure of a network [11, 13] and even responsible for the species-pairwise relationships of pollination networks [8, 14]
The primary objective of this study is to determine whether relative species abundance together with species traits can better predict the structure of monthly pollination networks than yearly ones
Summary
Every species within a biological community can directly or indirectly interact with every other species to form a complex ecological network. Relative species abundance as a predator for pairwise interaction frequency networks are often endowed with distinct and repeated patterns [1, 2] that are functionally significant. Nested pollination networks are mostly explained by species traits (a niche process) and relative abundance (a neutral process), as noted in a number of studies [7,8,9]. Despite the success of predicting the nested architecture of pollination networks [13, 15,16,17], relative species abundance explains very little of the frequency of species pairwise interactions in pollination networks [18,19,20,21]. Even in the models incorporating phenology and species traits, it cannot successfully predict the interaction frequencies of pollination networks [8, 9, 19]
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