Abstract
Despite clear evidence that some pollinator populations are declining, our ability to predict pollinator communities prone to collapse or species at risk of local extinction is remarkably poor. Here, we develop a model grounded in the structuralist approach that allows us to draw sound predictions regarding the temporal persistence of species in mutualistic networks. Using high-resolution data from a six-year study following 12 independent plant–pollinator communities, we confirm that pollinator species with more persistent populations in the field are theoretically predicted to tolerate a larger range of environmental changes. Persistent communities are not necessarily more diverse, but are generally located in larger habitat patches, and present a distinctive combination of generalist and specialist species resulting in a more nested structure, as predicted by previous theoretical work. Hence, pollinator interactions directly inform about their ability to persist, opening the door to use theoretically informed models to predict species’ fate within the ongoing global change.
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Data availability
A dataset of species interaction and abundances can be accessed via Zenodo52. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The code used in this study can be downloaded from Zenodo52.
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Acknowledgements
We thank taxonomists L. O. Aguado and T. Wood. This research was funded through the 2017–2018 Belmont Forum and BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals, under the BiodivScen ERA-Net COFUND programme, and with the funding organisations AEI, NWO, ECCyT and NSF to I.B. and V.D.-G. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2021 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101064340 to V.D.-G., TASTE Project (PID2021-127607OB-I00) to O.G, I.B. and V.D.-G., and BeeFUN project (PCIG 14-GA-2013-631653) to I.B.
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V.D.-G., O.G. and I.B. designed research; F.P.M. and I.B. did fieldwork and F.P.M. identified species; V.D.-G. developed code and analysed data; V.D.-G. and I.B. performed research; and V.D.-G., O.G. and I.B. wrote the paper.
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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Nico Bluethgen, Marília Palumbo Gaiarsa and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–17, Supplementary results and methods text, and Supplementary Tables 1 and 2.
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Source Data Figs. 2 and 3
Dataset of plant–pollinator interactions at each site and dataset of pollinators’ yearly abundance at each site.
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Domínguez-Garcia, V., Molina, F.P., Godoy, O. et al. Interaction network structure explains species’ temporal persistence in empirical plant–pollinator communities. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 423–429 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02314-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02314-3
