How exotic plants integrate into pollination networks

1. There is increasing world-wide concern about the impact of the introduction of exotic species on ecological communities. Since many exotic plants depend on native pollinators to successfully establish, it is of paramount importance that we understand precisely how exotic species integrate into existing plant–pollinator communities. 2. In this manuscript, we have studied a global data base of empirical pollination networks to determine whether community, network, species or interaction characteristics can help identify invaded communities. 3. We found that a limited number of community and network properties showed significant differences across the empirical data sets – namely networks with exotic plants present are characterized by greater total, plant and pollinator richness, as well as higher values of relative nestedness. 4. We also observed significant differences in terms of the pollinators that interact with the exotic plants. In particular, we found that specialist pollinators that are also weak contributors to community nestedness are far more likely to interact with exotic plants than would be expected by chance alone. 5. Synthesis. By virtue of their interactions, it appears that exotic plants may provide a key service to a community’s specialist pollinators as well as fill otherwise vacant ‘coevolutionary niches’

Niche Dimension as an Emergent Property of Food-Web Structure

Ecosystems are often described as food webs: networks in which nodes are species and links stand for predation. The research in the field of these ecological networks is becoming more and more relevant given the increasing pressure the ecosystems are facing, which makes the study of their topology specially interesting due to its interconnection with the dynamical processes taking place in it. The concept of the ecological niche of a species has been discussed for a long time. The term was originally used to refer to a species habitat or ecological role. It was then re-defined by Hutchinson as a position in a multi-dimensional hyperspace - each dimension being some biologically relevant magnitude [2].</p

Native and alien flower visitors differ in partner fidelity and network integration

<div><div>These data files support the following publication</div><div><br></div><div>Trøjelsgaard, K., Heleno, R., & Traveset, A. <b>Native and alien flower visitors differ in partner fidelity and network integration</b>. Ecology Letters, <i>accepted. </i>doi: 10.1111/ele.13287</div><div><i><br></i></div><div>For more details see the Read Me file or the original publication.</div></div><div><br></div><div><b><u>Abstract</u></b></div><div>Globalisation persistently fuels the establishment of non-native species outside their natural ranges. While alien plants have been intensively studied little is known about alien flower visitors, and especially, how they integrate into natural communities. Here we focus on mutualistic networks from five Galápagos islands to quantify whether alien and native flower visitors differ consistently in their pairwise interactions. We find that i) alien flower visitors have more interaction partners and larger species strengths (i.e. plants are more connected to alien insects), ii) native insects tend to have higher partner fidelity as they deviate more from random partner utilization, and iii) the difference between native and alien flower visitors in network integration intensifies with island degradation. Thus, native and alien flower visitors are not interchangeable, and alien establishment might have yet unforeseen consequences for the pairwise dynamics between plants and flower visitors on the Galápagos – especially on the heavily disturbed islands. <br></div

The role of Antarctic sea ice in global climate change

Taking a distinct interdisciplinary focus, a critical view is presented of the current state of research concerning Antarctic sea-ice/atmosphere/ocean interaction and its effect on climate on the interannual timescale, with particular regard to anthropogenic global warming. Sea-ice formation, morphology, thickness, extent, seasonality and distribution are introduced as vital factors in climatic feedbacks. Sea-ice / atmosphere interaction is next discussed, emphasizing its meteorological and topographical influences and the effects of and on polar cyclonic activity. This leads on to the central theme of sea ice in global climate change, which contains critiques of sea-ice climatic feedbacks, current findings on the representation of these feedbacks in global climatic models, and to what extent they are corroborated by observational evidence. Sea-ice/ocean interaction is particularly important. This is discussed with special reference to polynyas and leads, and the use of suitably coupled sea-ice/ocean models. A brief review of several possible climatic forcing factors is presented, which most highly rates a postulated ENSO-Antarctic sea-ice link. Sea-ice/atmosphere/ocean models need to be validated by adequate observations, both from satellites and ground based. In particular, models developed in the Arctic, where the observational network allows more reasonable validation, can be applied to the Antarctic in suitably modified form so as to account for unique features of the Antarctic cryosphere. Benefits in climatic modelling will be gained by treating Antarctic sea ice as a fully coupled component of global climate