MOE Key Laboratory of Biosystems Homeostasis and Protection, College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
School of Biological Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2023 Mar;7(3):393-404. doi: 10.1038/s41559-022-01973-y. Epub 2023 Jan 30.
Edge effects often exacerbate the negative effects of habitat loss on biodiversity. In forested ecosystems, however, many pollinators actually prefer open sunny conditions created by edge disturbances. We tested the hypothesis that forest edges have a positive buffering effect on plant-pollinator interaction networks in the face of declining forest area. In a fragmented land-bridge island system, we recorded ~20,000 plant-pollinator interactions on 41 islands over 3 yr. We show that plant richness and floral resources decline with decreasing forest area at both interior and edge sites, but edges maintain 10-fold higher pollinator abundance and richness regardless of area loss. Edge networks contain highly specialized species, with higher nestedness and lower modularity than interior networks, maintaining high robustness to extinction following area loss while forest interior networks collapse. Anthropogenic forest edges benefit community diversity and network robustness to extinction in the absence of natural gap-phase dynamics in small degraded forest remnants.
边缘效应常常会加剧栖息地丧失对生物多样性的负面影响。然而，在森林生态系统中，许多传粉者实际上更喜欢由边缘干扰产生的开阔、阳光充足的环境。我们检验了一个假设，即在森林面积减少的情况下，森林边缘对植物-传粉者相互作用网络具有积极的缓冲作用。在一个破碎的陆桥岛屿系统中，我们在 3 年内记录了 41 个岛屿上约 20000 次植物-传粉者的相互作用。我们表明，植物丰富度和花卉资源随着内部和边缘地点森林面积的减少而减少，但无论面积损失如何，边缘都保持了 10 倍以上的传粉者丰富度和丰富度。边缘网络包含高度专业化的物种，嵌套性更高，模块性更低，与内部网络相比，在面积损失后保持高灭绝鲁棒性，而森林内部网络则崩溃。在小而退化的森林残体中缺乏自然缺口动态的情况下，人为的森林边缘有利于社区多样性和网络对灭绝的鲁棒性。
