Plant species with the trait of continuous flowering do not hold core roles in a Neotropical lowland plant‐pollinating insect network

Abstract

Plant–animal interaction science repeatedly finds that plant species differ by orders of magnitude in the number of interactions they support. The identification of plant species that play key structural roles in plant–animal networks is a global conservation priority; however, in hyperdiverse systems such as tropical forests, empirical datasets are scarce. Plant species with longer reproductive seasons are posited to support more interactions compared to plant species with shorter reproductive seasons but this hypothesis has not been evaluated for plant species with the longest reproductive season possible at the individual plant level, the continuous reproductive phenology. Resource predictability is also associated with promoting specialization, and therefore, continuous reproduction may instead favor specialist interactions. Here, we use quantitative pollinating insect–plant networks constructed from countryside habitat of the Tropical Wet forest Life Zone and modularity analysis to test whether plant species that share the trait of continuous flowering hold core roles in mutualistic networks. With a few exceptions, most plant species sampled within our network were assigned to the role of peripheral. All but one network had significantly high modularity scores and each continuous flowering plant species was in a different module. Our work reveals that the continuous flowering plant species differed in some networks in their topological role, and that more evidence was found for the phenology to support specialized subsets of interactions. Our findings suggest that the conservation of Neotropical pollinating insect communities may require planting species from each module rather than identifying and conserving network hubs.

Key plant species to restore plant–hummingbird pollinator communities in the southern Andes of Ecuador

“…This result implies that project designed should include multiple plant species to avoid resource bottlenecks in given periods of the year (Maia et al 2019; CaraDonna et al 2021). The debate on which are the main drivers of this temporal variation is still open (CaraDonna et al 2021), but phenology and changes in plant abundance are likely factors (González‐Castro et al 2012; Valverde et al 2016; Hinton & Peters 2021). In contrast to key species, most peripheral species showed little variation in the centrality index across time, similar to that found by Miele et al (2020) for plant–insect interaction networks.…”

Grouped SPME Comparison of Floral Scent as a Method of Unlocking Phylogenetic Patterns in Volatiles

“…Plants play differing core roles in the plant-pollinator network that should be accounted for: framework species act as major pollen or nectar sources, bridging species provide resources in times of limitation, and magnet species help draw pollinators to less conspicuous flowers (Dixon, 2009). Identifying which plants play these core roles in the network is imperative for conservation and revegetation attempts, however, empirically assessing plant traits is time-consuming and expensive (Bartual et al, 2019;Hinton and Peters, 2021). Scent analysis, as described in this work, may allow us to infer the possible roles played by these plants and highlight species of interest.…”

Tropical bee species abundance differs within a narrow elevational gradient

“…Bee abundance data from 0 m elevation was collected during a previous study conducted from June to July 2017–2019 and December 2017 in the Osa Peninsula (OP) of Costa Rica 44 . The life zone of the OP corresponds to tropical wet forest.…”