Landscape type and floral resources modify plant-pollinator network structure and stability: implications for pathogen exchange
Résumé
Pollinators face multiple, potentially interacting threats from human activities. The Biodiversa VOODOO project (https://voodoo-project.eu/) seeks to understand how land-use, through its impact on floral resources, affects plant pollinator communities and the transmission of viruses between pollinator species. Land-use can modify plant-pollinator network structure (e.g. connectance, nestedness, modularity) in ways that modulate the vulnerability of communities to coextinctions propagated through losses of interspecific links between mutualist partners.
Using a Stochastic Co-extinction Model (SCM) we correlated plant-pollinator coextinction cascades with network structure in agricultural, rural or urban landscapes, explicitly correcting for network size and intrinsic dependence on mutualism among species. Differences in network architecture between the landscapes influenced the propensity for co-extinction cascades and species losses. Such shifts in plantpollinator networks also have implications for pollinator-pathogen interactions and we present initial results highlighting how network structure can affect interspecific viral transfer among bee species.