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Global warming and the disruption of plant-pollinator interactions
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posted on 2023-06-08, 04:52 authored by Jane Memmott, Paul G Craze, Nickolas M Waser, Mary V PriceAnthropogenic climate change is widely expected to drive species extinct by hampering individual survival and reproduction, by reducing the amount and accessibility of suitable habitat, or by eliminating other organisms that are essential to the species in question. Less well appreciated is the likelihood that climate change will directly disrupt or eliminate mutually beneficial (mutualistic) ecological interactions between species even before extinctions occur. We explored the potential disruption of a ubiquitous mutualistic interaction of terrestrial habitats, that between plants and their animal pollinators, via climate change. We used a highly resolved empirical network of interactions between 1420 pollinator and 429 plant species to simulate consequences of the phenological shifts that can be expected with a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Depending on model assumptions, phenological shifts reduced the floral resources available to 1750% of all pollinator species, causing as much as half of the ancestral activity period of the animals to fall at times when no food plants were available. Reduced overlap between plants and pollinators also decreased diet breadth of the pollinators. The predicted result of these disruptions is the extinction of pollinators, plants and their crucial interactions.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Journal
Ecology LettersISSN
1461-023XPublisher
WileyExternal DOI
Issue
8Volume
10Page range
710 -717Pages
8.0Department affiliated with
- Biology and Environmental Science Publications
Notes
Conceived, wrote and ran programs that shifted phenologies and calculated the consequences. Wrote supplimentary methods. Wrote sections of manuscript relating the study to evolution. The study unusually uses a large, historical data set to address a neglected aspect of climate change and would have been impossible without computational methods.Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2012-02-06First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2018-03-21Usage metrics
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