The impacts of interannual climate variation on pollination network structure of a sub-alpine meadow: from 2008 to 2021

Abstract

Understanding how climate conditions variation influences the pollination network structure is important for predicting the response of the plant and the pollinator communities, especially for alpine ecosystems, which are sensitive to climate change. Here, we investigated the pollination network of a sub-alpine meadow community by separating the pollinators into categories for ten years, from 2008 to 2010 and 2015 to 2021, and examined the relationships between precipitation or temperature and network metrics at the network, group and species-level. The results showed that the plant-pollinator networks were relatively stable across years, and the variation of network structure metrics were larger than that of growing-season and annual precipitation or temperature. The precipitation and temperature have different effects on the network metrics. Reduced precipitations increase competition among pollinator categories, leading to higher niche overlap of pollinator categories. While increased temperatures resulted in less pollinator sharing, leading to a more specialized network with decreased nestedness. This study contributes to the understanding of how interannual climate change affect plant-pollinator network, and emphasizes the importance of predicting the impact of climate change on ecosystem services.