network ecology

New paper: Climate influences pollinator roles in plant-pollinator networks

Manu Saunders1 Comment

Saunders, Kendall, Lanuza, Hall, Rader, Stavert. Climate mediates roles of pollinator species in plant–pollinator networks, Global Ecology & Biogeography

This was a fun collaboration that started a few years ago when I was postdoc in the Rader Lab. It originated with an idea I proposed one day in a lab meeting to test a common assumption about pollinators: that flies are more common pollinators than bees when it’s cold.

This is one of those anecdotal assumptions that any pollination ecologist ‘knows’ is very likely true, based on what we see in the field and what we know about relevant ecology. There are localised studies that show these patterns occur at particular times and places, but when you need a general reference to cite, there is very little evidence at the global scale to support a general pattern.

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New paper: using network analysis to understand ecosystem function in agricultural landscapes

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Saunders ME, Rader R (2019) Network modularity influences plant reproduction in a mosaic tropical agroecosystem. Proc. R. Soc. B 286: 20190296. (all data and code available on github)

I’m so excited about our new paper! We use network analysis in a cool new way to understand how pollinator community structure influences ecosystem function in a heterogeneous landscape. Understanding links between structure and function is a core goal of ecological research, but there are still plenty of things we don’t know about these relationships. Continue reading →

Why I posted my first preprint

Manu Saunders7 Comments

I’ve just published my first preprint. If you’re not familiar with preprints, they are final versions of a paper manuscript that are posted online before they have been peer reviewed.

Long-time followers of my blog will know that I am not a huge fan of preprints. Preprints are not the answer to our angst over peer review, because they involve too many risky assumptions.

So why did I just publish one? Continue reading →

The Importance of Surveying Pollinators Across Various Environmental Conditions

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This is a guest post by Emma Goodwin, a UNE honours student I’m co-supervising with Romina Rader and Francisco Encinas-Viso at CSIRO. Emma spent a few weeks over summer in Kosciuszko National Park, catching pollinators and collecting data on alpine plant-pollinator networks, and is currently writing up her exciting results! This blog is co-posted over at the Rader Lab website.

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Recent plant-pollinator network studies have been concerned with the impacts that climate change may have on pollination across various ecosystems, particularly in alpine regions. Many of these studies are investigating ‘phenological mismatch’ as a significant issue that may result from climate change.

‘Phenological mismatch’ or ‘phenological asynchrony’ is used to refer to when the emergence of pollinators and flowering time of plants becomes out of sync over time. If these two processes become out of sync then it reduces the potential for flowering plants to be pollinated. Continue reading →