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Specialisation in food resource use is a crucial process that fosters species coexistence in plant–animal networks, contributing to the maintenance of biodiversity, ecological complexity, and community stability. Notably, although there is a vast literature on ecological specialisation in pollination systems, the evolutionary similarity among the plant species visited by particular pollinators has been largely ignored. Here, we apply a robust phylogenetic approach to analyse whether the evolutionary relatedness of plant species is a significant factor in mediating pollinator visits and how it relates to the morphology of interacting species. We quantified ecological and clade specialisation of hummingbird and insect species in three mutualistic networks from the Costa Rican highlands and associated these metrics with species traits. We found that hummingbirds were overall ecologically more specialised than insects (i.e. visited a less diverse set of plant species). However, when evaluating the phylogenetic relatedness among the visited plant species, all hummingbird species and most insects had overdispersed diets, which indicates they visited phylogenetically distant plant species in the community. Moreover, a great proportion of these clade generalists visited plant species with a great variation in corolla length, showing a lack of preference for this morphological trait. Altogether, our results demonstrate that by incorporating plant phylogeny to network analysis, pollinator species were generalists and that corolla length weakly influences plant–pollinator interactions in the three studied networks. A phylogenetic perspective should occupy a central role in the study of specialisation since it contributes to understanding the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes in mutualistic networks. Future research should focus on evaluating whether the phylogenetic structure of animal diets mediates patterns of interactions in different types of mutualisms and environmental contexts, linking these patterns to other floral traits. This knowledge may be valuable for deepening our comprehension of the underlying mechanisms shaping ecological networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: When describing plant–animal interaction networks, sampling can be performed using plant‐ or animal‐centred approaches. Despite known effects of sampling on network structure, how samplings affect the estimates of interaction β‐diversity across networks is still unresolved.We investigated how the sampling method affects the assessment of β‐diversity of interactions, turnover and rewiring. We contrasted plant‐ and animal‐centred sampling methods applied to pollination networks across habitats in a heterogeneous tropical landscape, the Pantanal Wetlands. We also asked whether plant traits influence the difference in interaction specialization according to sampling.Plant‐centred networks resulted in higher β‐diversity of interactions in space than animal‐centred networks. Turnover explained most of the β‐diversity in both methods, but rewiring was proportionately more important when using the animal‐centred method. While the plant‐centred method indicated lower network modularity and specialization, floral traits modulated the effects of the sampling method on species‐level network metrics.Combining animal‐ and plant‐centred approaches returned intermediate values for β‐diversity of interactions and network metrics. Distinct methods may also be better suited for answering questions at different scales. Our results point out that the method choice, or combination of methods, should always reflect the appropriate scale of the factors determining the interactions being investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human demands on resources such as food and energy are increasing through time while global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss are becoming more complex to overcome, as well as more widely acknowledged by societies and governments. Reports from initiatives like the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have demanded quick and reliable access to high-quality spatial and temporal data of species occurrences, their interspecific relations and the effects of the environment on biotic interactions. Mapping species interactions is crucial to understanding and conserving ecosystem functioning and all the services it can provide (Tylianakis et al. 2010, Slade et al. 2017). Detailed data has the potential to improve our knowledge about ecological and evolutionary processes guided by interspecific interactions, as well as to assist in planning and decision making for biodiversity conservation and restoration (Menz et al. 2011). Although a great effort has been made to successfully standardize and aggregate species occurrence data, a formal standard to support biotic interaction data sharing and interoperability is still lacking. There are different biological interactions that can be studied, such as predator-prey, host-parasite and pollinator-plant and there is a variety of data practices and data representation procedures that can be used. Plant-pollinator interactions are recognized in many sources from the scientific literature (Abrol 2012, Ollerton 2021) for the importance of ecosystem functioning and sustainable agriculture. Primary data about pollination are becoming increasingly available online and can be accessed from a great number of data repositories. While a vast quantity of data on interactions, and on pollination in particular, is available, data are not integrated among sources, largely because of a lack of appropriate standards. We present a vocabulary of terms for sharing plant-pollinator interactions using one of the existing extensions to the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012). In particular, the vocabulary is meant to be used for the term measurementType of the Extended Measurement Or Facts extension. The vocabulary was developed by a community of specialists in pollination biology and information science, including members of the TDWG Biological Interaction Data Interest Group, during almost four years of collaborative work. The vocabulary introduces 40 new terms, comprising many aspects of plant-pollinator interactions, and can be used to capture information produced by studies with different approaches and scales. The plant-pollinator interactions vocabulary is mainly a set of terms that can be both understood by people or interpreted by machines. The plant-pollinator vocabulary is composed of a defining a set of terms and descriptive documents explaining how the vocabulary is to be used. The terms in the vocabulary are divided into six categories: Animal, Plants, Flower, Interaction, Reproductive Success and Nectar Dynamics. The categories are not formally part of the vocabulary, they are used only to organize the vocabulary and to facilitate understanding by humans. We expect that the plant-pollinator vocabulary will contribute to data aggregation from a variety of sources worldwide at higher levels than we have experienced, significantly amplify plant-pollinator data availability for global synthesis, and contribute to knowledge in conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim To investigate the role of alien plants in mutualistic plant-hummingbird networks, assessing the importance of species traits, floral abundance and insularity on alien plant integration. Location Mainland and insular Americas. Methods We used species-level network indices to assess the role of alien plants in 21 quantitative plant-hummingbird networks where alien plants occur. We then evaluated whether plant traits, including previous adaptations to bird pollination, and insularity predict these network roles. Additionally, for a subset of networks for which floral abundance data were available, we tested whether this relates to network roles. Finally, we tested the association between hummingbird traits and the probability of interaction with alien plants across the networks. Results Within the 21 networks, we identified 32 alien plant species and 352 native plant species. On average, alien plant species attracted more hummingbird species (i.e. aliens had a higher degree) and had a higher proportion of interactions across their hummingbird visitors than native plants (i.e. aliens had a higher species strength). At the same time, an average alien plant was visited more exclusively by certain hummingbird species (i.e. had a higher level of complementary specialization). Large alien plants and those occurring on islands had more evenly distributed interactions, thereby acting as connectors. Other evaluated plant traits and floral abundance were unimportant predictors of network roles. Short-billed hummingbirds had higher probability of including alien plants in their interactions than long-billed species. Main conclusions Once incorporated into plant-hummingbird networks, alien plants appear strongly integrated and, thus, may have a large influence on network dynamics. Plant traits and floral abundance were generally poor predictors of how well alien species are integrated. Short-billed hummingbirds, often characterized as functionally generalized pollinators, facilitate the integration of alien plants. Our results show that plant-hummingbird networks are open for invasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Time-lapse cameras were used to monitor species and individual-based networks. • Plants with lower centrality presented higher fitness in individual-based networks. • Plants with lower selectivity presented higher fitness in individual-based networks. • An individual-based network is a useful tool to understand plant fitness. In animal-pollinated plants, fitness is affected by pollinator attraction and plant-pollinator trait matching. Plant-pollinator interactions are often characterized using metrics derived from mutualistic networks, such as centrality and interaction selectivity. This approach often focuses on the species level, thus neglecting significant among-individual variation in attracting foraging pollinators and associated fitness consequences for plants. Here, we tested if centrality and interaction selectivity were related to fitness at the species and the individual level for 14 hummingbird-pollinated plant species in the Atlantic Forest. In addition, we tested if plant-pollinator trait-matching influenced plant fitness. At the species-level, we did not find a relationship between plant fitness and centrality nor interaction selectivity; we found instead that plant fitness increased with higher trait-matching between bill and corolla lengths. At the individual-level we found that individuals with higher centrality values produced less seeds, likely due to lower quality in pollen deposition. Moreover, individuals with a lower interaction selectivity also produced more seeds, probably because of higher conspecific pollen flow. Our results show that individual position and interaction selectivity within pollination networks may have important implications for pollination effectiveness and hence plant fitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]