Abstract
Plant–visitor food webs provide important insights into species interactions, and more information about their seasonal dynamics is vital to understanding the resilience of species to external pressures. Studies of Arctic networks can also improve our understanding of species responses to the pressures of climate change. This study provides the first description of a plant – insect visitor network in Svalbard, a High Arctic archipelago already experiencing the consequences of climate change. A subset of the network was collected from experimental plots where the snow melt date was delayed with snow fences. The deep snow plots delayed flowering and we expected this to disrupt plant–visitor interactions compared with ambient snow conditions. However, the composition of flowers and insect visitors were similar between regimes, and the network tracked patterns of overall flowering phenology. Nevertheless, the deep snow significantly reduced the average overlap between flower availability and insect activity, reducing the probability of an interaction. We suggest that at a landscape scale, Arctic pollinators will benefit from patchy changes to snow melt that maintain heterogeneity in the timing of flowering but changes that increase homogeneity in snowmelt across the landscape may negatively impact some species.
Highlights
Recent work in pollination ecology has explored the temporal dynamics of plant-visitation networks for within- and between-season patterns, to understand how such important webs are structured and built up through time (Rasmussen et al, 2013, Pradal et al, 2009, Caradonna et al, 2017)
Plant - visitor food webs provide important insights into species interactions, and more information about their seasonal dynamics is vital to understanding the resilience of species to external pressures
This study provides the first description of a plant – insect visitor network in Svalbard, a High Arctic archipelago already experiencing the consequences of climate change
Summary
Recent work in pollination ecology has explored the temporal dynamics of plant-visitation networks for within- and between-season patterns, to understand how such important webs are structured and built up through time (Rasmussen et al, 2013, Pradal et al, 2009, Caradonna et al, 2017). Plant-visitation networks are constructed by quantifying the mutualistic interactions between flowering plant species and flower-visiting insect species, often assuming that the latter are performing a pollination role (Bascompte and Jordano, 2007). The properties of such networks can tell us much about the mechanisms behind network assembly and stability, and tend to be conserved across a range of biomes (Bascompte et al, 2003). Much less is known about whether general network properties of “static” networks (those constructed using data from the entire season) can be generalised to “dynamic” networks, or those
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