Dataset Information

Zooming into plant-flower visitor networks: an individual trait-based approach.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how ecological communities are structured is a major goal in ecology. Ecological networks representing interaction patterns among species have become a powerful tool to capture the mechanisms underlying plant-animal assemblages. However, these networks largely do not account for inter-individual variability and thus may be limiting our development of a clear mechanistic understanding of community structure. In this study, we develop a new individual-trait based approach to examine the importance of individual plant and pollinator functional size traits (pollinator thorax width and plant nectar holder depth) in mutualistic networks. We performed hierarchical cluster analyses to group interacting individuals into classes, according to their similarity in functional size. We then compared the structure of bee-flower networks where nodes represented either species identity or trait sets. The individual trait-based network was almost twice as nested as its species-based equivalent and it had a more symmetric linkage pattern resulting from of a high degree of size-matching. In conclusion, we show that by constructing individual trait-based networks we can reveal important patterns otherwise difficult to observe in species-based networks and thus improve our understanding of community structure. We therefore recommend using both trait-based and species-based approaches together to develop a clearer understanding of the properties of ecological networks.

SUBMITTER: Rumeu B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6147118 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Zooming into plant-flower visitor networks: an individual trait-based approach.

Rumeu Beatriz B Sheath Danny J DJ Hawes Joseph E JE Ings Thomas C TC

PeerJ 20180917

Understanding how ecological communities are structured is a major goal in ecology. Ecological networks representing interaction patterns among species have become a powerful tool to capture the mechanisms underlying plant-animal assemblages. However, these networks largely do not account for inter-individual variability and thus may be limiting our development of a clear mechanistic understanding of community structure. In this study, we develop a new individual-trait based approach to examine ...[more]

PMID: 30245938

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Project description:Geographical variations in environmental factors can affect species diversity and consequently influence the structure of interspecific ecological interactions. Relationships between flowering plants and animal flower visitors are among the most important ecological interactions and can structure and maintain ecological diversity in different environments. Additionally, many animal and plant species participate in these interactions, which shape the specific characteristics of these communities, in terms of both the responses of the interacting species involved and environmental differences. Therefore, in the present study we investigated geographical and environmental effects on the architecture of Neotropical flower-visitor networks of vertebrates and invertebrates. To this end, we used data regarding interaction networks available in the literature and constructed binary interaction networks of plants and plant-visitors (hummingbirds and insects) and tested the effects of altitude, latitude, vegetation type and number of plant families on the structure of these networks. In total, we analyzed 55 networks of flower-visitor interactions with 746 species of flower-visiting animals and 1,185 species of plants, totaling 5,463 distinct plant-animal interactions. In general, the architecture of flower-visitor networks varied along latitudinal and altitudinal gradients, with more pronounced effects for flower-insect networks in which latitude influenced network size, modularity, and nestedness, and altitude influenced network size and connectance. Flower-hummingbird networks in open vegetation (grassland) were more modular than networks in other environments. The number of plant families positively influenced the size of insect and hummingbird networks, and positively affected connectance and nestedness and negatively affected modularity in the flower-insect networks. So, the patterns we found indicate that plant-visitor interactions in flower-insect and flower-hummingbird networks are differently affected by geographical and plant-related factors, possibly due to the differences in taxonomic and functional groups involved in these interactions.

Dataset Information

Zooming into plant-flower visitor networks: an individual trait-based approach.

Publications

Zooming into plant-flower visitor networks: an individual trait-based approach.

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