Year-round temporal stability of a tropical, urban plant-pollinator network

Abstract

© 2020 Stewart, Waitayachart. 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. Plant-pollinator interactions are known to vary across time, both in terms of species composition and the associations between partner species. However, less is known about tropical pollination networks, and tropical urban parks provide a unique opportunity to study network stability in an environment where temperature and floral resources are relatively constant due to both the tropical climate as well as park horticulture. The objectives of this study were thus to examine the interactions between flowering plants and their potential pollinators in a large, tropical city (Bangkok, Thailand) across 12 consecutive months, and to assess the stability of network properties over time. We conducted monthly pollinator observations at 9 parks spaced throughout the city, and collected data on temperature, precipitation, floral abundance and floral species richness. We found that neither pollinator abundance nor richness varied significantly across months when all parks were pooled. However, pollinator abundance was significantly influenced by floral abundance, floral richness, and their interaction, and pollinator richness was significantly influenced by floral richness and precipitation. Finally, we found that network properties did not change across months, even as species composition did. We conclude that the year-round constancy of floral resources and climate conditions appear to create a network in dynamic equilibrium, where plant and pollinator species compositions change, but network properties remain stable. The results of this study provide useful information about how tropical pollinators respond to urban environments, which is particularly relevant given that most urban development is predicted to occur in the tropics.