Journal
ARTHROPOD-PLANT INTERACTIONS
Volume 11, Issue 4, Pages 561-566Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11829-016-9493-1
Keywords
Community ecology; Plant-pollinator network; Robustness; Specialization
Categories
Funding
- Paris Lodron University of Salzburg
- Graduate School Evolutionary Networks: Organisms, Reactions, Molecules (E-Norm) of the Heinrich-Heine-University, Dusseldorf, Germany
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG JU 2856/2-2]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Appropriate sampling effort of interaction networks is necessary to extract robust indices describing the structure of species interactions. Here we show that time-invariant variation in the composition and diversity of interaction partners of plant individuals of the same species explains volatility in aggregate network statistics due to undersampling. Within a multi-species pollinator-plant interaction matrix, we replaced the interactions observed on multiple individuals of a single plant species (Sinapis arvensis, pooled interactions) with the plant-insect interactions observed on a single plant individual. In the resampling approach, we considered the interactions of 1 to 84 S. arvensis individuals in different combinations. For each resampled network, several commonly applied aggregated statistics were calculated to test how intraspecific variation affects the properties of a multi-species network. Our results showed that aggregate statistics are sensitive towards qualitative and quantitative intraspecific variation of flower-visitor interactions within a multi-species network, which may affect the ecological interpretation about the properties of a community. These findings challenge the robustness of commonly applied network indices, confirm the urge for a sufficient and representative sampling of interactions, and emphasize the significance of intraspecific variation in the context of communities and networks.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available