Adaptive foraging of pollinators fosters gradual tipping under resource competition and rapid environmental change

Sjoerd Terpstra, Flávia M. D. Marquitti, Vítor V. Vasconcelos*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Plant and pollinator communities are vital for transnational food chains. Like many natural systems, they are affected by global change: rapidly deteriorating conditions threaten their numbers. Previous theoretical studies identified the potential for community-wide collapse above critical levels of environmental stressors—so-called bifurcation-induced tipping points. Fortunately, even as conditions deteriorate, individuals have some adaptive capacity, potentially increasing the boundary for a safe operating space where changes in ecological processes are reversible. Our study considers this adaptive capacity of pollinators to resource availability and identifies a new threat to disturbed pollinator communities. We model the adaptive foraging of pollinators in changing environments. Pollinator’s adaptive foraging alters the dynamical responses of species, to the advantage of some—typically generalists—and the disadvantage of others, with systematic non-linear and non-monotonic effects on the abundance of particular species. We show that, in addition to the extent of environmental stress, the pace of change of environmental stress can also lead to the early collapse of both adaptive and nonadaptive pollinator communities. Specifically, perturbed communities exhibit rate-induced tipping points at stress levels within the safe boundary defined for constant stressors. With adaptive foraging, tipping is a more asynchronous collapse of species compared to nonadaptive pollinator communities, meaning that not all pollinator species reach a tipping event simultaneously. These results suggest that it is essential to consider the adaptive capacity of pollinator communities for monitoring and conservation. Both the extent and the rate of stress change relative to the ability of communities to recover are critical environmental boundaries.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere1011762
Number of pages24
JournalPLoS Computational Biology
Volume20
Issue number1
Early online date9 Jan 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Jan 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2024 Terpstra et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding

The authors acknowledge the fruitful discussions and stimulating environment that occurred during the 'BIRS workshop [22w5067]: Rate-Induced Transitions in Networked Systems.' A special thanks to the several discussions with Guido Vaessen, who provided continuous comments throughout, and to Theresa W. Ong, Kristen M. Jovanelly, Chenyang Su, and Wenying Liao, who provided initial comments on the research. A further thank-you note to Mike Lees, who provided valuable and motivating comments on the research and initial versions of the figures and original manuscript. ST acknowledges the support of the Institute of Advanced Study (University of Amsterdam) where part of the work was carried out.

FundersFunder number
Institute for Advanced Study, University of Amsterdam (NL)22w5067
Institute of Advanced Study (University of Amsterdam)

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