Community assembly models, usually constructed for food webs, are an important component of our understanding of how ecological communities are formed. However, models for mutualistic community assembly are still needed, especially because these communities are experiencing significant anthropogenic disturbances that affect their biodiversity. Here, we present a unique network model that simulates the colonization and extinction process of mutualistic community assembly. We generate regional source pools of species interaction networks on the basis of statistical properties reported in the literature. We develop a dynamic synchronous Boolean framework to simulate, with few free parameters, the dynamics of new mutualistic community formation from the regional source pool. This approach allows us to deterministically map out every possible trajectory of community formation. This level of detail is rarely observed in other analytic approaches and allows for thorough analysis of the dynamical properties of community formation. As for food web assembly, we find that the number of stable communities is quite low, and the composition of the source pool influences the abundance and nature of community outcomes. However, in contrast to food web assembly, stable mutualistic communities form rapidly. Small communities with minor fluctuations in species presence/absence (selfsimilar limit cycles) are the most common community outcome. The unique application of this Boolean network approach to the study of mutualistic community assembly offers a great opportunity to improve our understanding of these critical communities.mutualism | transition graph | bipartite
The production of diverse and affordable agricultural crop species depends on pollination services provided by bees. Indeed, the proportion of pollinator-dependent crops is increasing globally. Agriculture relies heavily on the domesticated honeybee; the services provided by this single species are under threat and becoming increasingly costly. Importantly, the free pollination services provided by diverse wild bee communities have been shown to be sufficient for high agricultural yields in some systems. However, stable, functional wild bee communities require floral resources, such as pollen and nectar, throughout their active season, not just when crop species are in flower. To target floral provisioning efforts to conserve and support native and managed bee species, we apply network theoretical methods incorporating plant and pollinator phenologies. Using a two-year dataset comprising interactions between bees (superfamily Apoidea, Anthophila) and 25 native perennial plant species in floral provisioning habitat, we identify plant and bee species that provide a key and central role to the stability of the structure of this community. We also examine three specific case studies: how provisioning habitat can provide temporally continuous support for honeybees (Apis mellifera) and bumblebees (Bombus impatiens), and how resource supplementation strategies might be designed for a single genus of important orchard pollinators (Osmia). This framework could be used to provide native bee communities with additional, well-targeted floral resources to ensure that they not only survive, but also thrive.
In this paper the authors take advantage of the simplicity of an insular community to evaluate the relative importance of species' phenotypic traits and species' abundance in determining fruit-avian disperser interactions, at both network and pairwise interaction levels. The authors innovatively include fruit nutrient compounds in fruit-avian network analyses. Although the best way to predict plant-avian interactions was based on both phenotypic traits and species abundance, the most important factor to explain these mutualistic interactions was fruit-beak size overlap, followed by species abundance and fruit nutrient compounds. This work will encourage further studies to look for similar patterns in more species-rich communities.
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