Integrative Ecology Group, Estación Biológica de Doñana, EBD-CSIC, Sevilla, Spain.
Departamento de Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Facultad de Biología, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain.
Ecol Lett. 2023 Mar;26(3):448-459. doi: 10.1111/ele.14163. Epub 2023 Jan 23.
Patterns of resource use observed at the species level emerge from the way individuals exploit the range of available resources. Hence, accounting for interindividual differences in resource use, such as pollinator use by plants, is essential to advance our understanding of community assembly and persistence. By using finely resolved data on plant-pollinator interactions, we evaluated how interindividual plant variation in pollinator use scales up to affect community structure and dynamics. All co-occurring plant species comprised specialists interacting with proper subsets of pollinators that visited generalists, and differences in interaction patterns were driven by among-individual trait variation. Furthermore, the nested structure and feasibility of plant-pollinator communities were maximised at higher levels of interindividual plant variation in traits and pollinator use. Our study sheds light on how pervasive properties of community structure arise from individual-level processes and contributes to elucidate the importance of preserving intraspecific variation in traits and resource use within populations.
在物种水平上观察到的资源利用模式源自个体利用可用资源范围的方式。因此，要深入了解群落组装和持续存在的机制，就必须考虑到个体间在资源利用方面的差异，如植物的传粉者利用情况。通过使用关于植物-传粉者相互作用的精细分辨率数据，我们评估了个体间植物传粉者利用的变化如何影响群落结构和动态。所有共存的植物物种都由与访问广域种的传粉者的适当子集相互作用的专性物种组成，而相互作用模式的差异是由个体间性状变异驱动的。此外，在个体间性状和传粉者利用的变异水平较高的情况下，植物-传粉者群落的嵌套结构和可行性最大化。我们的研究阐明了群落结构的普遍性质如何源于个体层面的过程，并有助于阐明在种群内保护性状和资源利用的种内变异的重要性。
