Using individual-based trait frequency distributions to forecast plant-pollinator network responses to environmental change
Author(s)
Cantwell-Jones, Aoife
Tylianakis, Jason
Larson, Keith
Gill, Richard
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Determining how and why organisms interact is fundamental to understanding ecosystem responses to future environmental change. To assess the impact on plant-pollinator interactions, recent studies have examined how the effects of environmental change on individual interactions accumulate to generate species-level responses. Here, we review recent developments in using plant-pollinator networks of interacting individuals along with their functional traits, where individuals are nested within species nodes. We highlight how these individual-level, trait-based networks connect intraspecific trait variation (as frequency distributions of multiple traits) with dynamic responses within plant-pollinator communities. This approach can better explain interaction plasticity, and changes to interaction probabilities and network structure over spatiotemporal or other environmental gradients. We argue that only through appreciating such trait-based interaction plasticity can we accurately forecast the potential vulnerability of interactions to future environmental change. We follow this with general guidance on how future studies can collect and analyse high-resolution interaction and trait data, with the hope of improving predictions of future plant-pollinator network responses for targeted and effective conservation.
Date Issued
2024-01-27
Date Acceptance
2024-01-04
Citation
Ecology Letters, 2024, 27 (1)
ISSN
1461-023X
Publisher
Wiley
Journal / Book Title
Ecology Letters
Volume
27
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2024 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN e14368
Date Publish Online
2024-01-21