Biology subjects

Ollerton, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Ollerton, J..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Climate-driven specialisation in plant-pollinator networks peaks outside the tropics

Pollination is a key ecological process sustaining biodiversity and food security, yet global patterns of plant-pollinator specialisation have remained unresolved. Using the largest global dataset of quantitative networks (>3,400 networks, >110,000 interactions), we show that the latitudinal specialisation gradient (LSG) exists, but it is non-linear, hemispherically asymmetric, and strongly taxon-dependent. Network-level and pollinator specialisation were lowest in the tropics and peaked at northern mid-latitudes, whereas plants tended to become more specialised toward higher latitudes. Climate consistently outperformed latitude, species richness, and environmental productivity as a predictor of these patterns. Specialisation declined with increasing temperature, rose with moderate rainfall before declining at the wettest sites, and increased with temperature seasonality, but plants and pollinators responded differently to these drivers. Functional groups diverged strongly: ectothermic insects were most specialised in cooler, seasonal climates, while birds showed weaker links to latitude but reduced specialisation in wetter regions. These findings demonstrate that climate, rather than latitude or species richness, structures global variation in specialisation. Because warmer and less seasonal climates promote generalisation, climate change is likely to disrupt the most specialised pollination systems, unevenly across taxa and regions, with important consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem stability.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

An empirical attack tolerance test alters the structure and species richness of plant-pollinator networks

Ecological network theory hypothesizes a link between structure and stability, but this has mainly been investigated in-silico. In an experimental manipulation, we sequentially removed four generalist plants from real plant-pollinator networks and explored the effects on, and drivers of, species and interaction extinctions, network structure and interaction rewiring. Our results indicate that cumulative species and interaction extinctions increased faster with generalist plant loss than what was expected by co-extinction models, which predicted the survival or extinction of many species incorrectly. In addition, network nestedness decreased, modularity increased, and opportunistic random interactions and structural unpredictability emerged, which are all indicators of network instability and fragility. Conversely, interaction reorganization (rewiring) was high, asymmetries between network levels emerged as plants increased their centrality. From the experimental manipulations of real networks, our study shows how plant-pollinator network structure has low stability and changes towards a more fragile state when generalist plants are lost.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Experimental loss of generalist plants reveals alterations in plant-pollinator interactions and a constrained flexibility of foraging

Species extinctions undermine ecosystem functioning but species do not disappear at random. Ecosystem dynamics are ruled by a subset of dominant species, but it is not clear how losing several of these key species would affect plant-pollinator interactions. We tested how the experimental loss of the most highly visited generalist plants would affect flower visitor abundances (visitation) and pollinator effectiveness (quantity of pollen-tubes within pistils) in several sites. Significant changes in the plant-pollinator communities were detected. Firstly, visitation decreased after removing 1-2 most visited plants, suggesting that these species mostly facilitate other plants by keeping high flower visitor abundances in the sites. Nevertheless, we recorded within-site variations of these trends, especially among sampled transects and among plant species, suggesting that complex facilitation-competition interactions occur among plants, but that these vary among transects within the same sites. Pollinator effectiveness fluctuated but not in a clear linear way and was not directly linked to changes of flower visitation. This suggests that fluctuations of pollinator effectiveness might be due to destabilization of the pollinators by the removal of key resources. In addition, we detected a constrained flexibility of the foraging of flower visitors because they did not switch among flower shapes and they favoured specific plant traits such as high sugar content, small inflorescences and taller plants. Indeed, these constraints would eventually limit utilisation of new resources after perturbations, possibly undermining the stability of the system. In conclusion, our work demonstrates that the loss of dominant, highly generalist plants alters plant-pollinator interactions with implications for pollination and insect foraging. Therefore, in order to preserve ecosystems, generalist plants should not get lost, because they sustain the complex pattern of interactions between plants and flower visitors.

ecology↗