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Student 10-Minute Presentation Competition

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Student Competition

Student

Grad 10-min Competition: P-IE, Pollinators 2

Poking pollination networks: A process-driven approach to investigating network rewiring

Monday, November 10, 2025
11:54 AM - 12:06 PM Pacific
Location: Oregon Convention Center, E141-142, OCC
Oral Presentation Student Competition
In plant pollinator networks, the structure of who interacts with whom shapes community function and dynamics. Understanding the processes that drive shifts in interaction structure can provide insight into the capacity of plant-pollinator networks to respond to novel stressors. However, integrating process-based models of pollinator foraging behavior with empirically observed shifts in the strength and presence of species interactions continues to be a challenge. In this study, we conducted a manipulative field experiment to investigate how a perturbation to the reward-value of a single flowering plant species ripples through a plant pollinator interaction network. We hypothesized that pollinators directly affected by the perturbation would reallocate foraging effort to unperturbed species of flowering plants, in turn causing indirectly affected pollinators to shift their foraging effort in response to increased competition. While we continue to gather and analyze data, preliminary results suggest that insect pollinators change location rather than shift foraging effort to a different flowering plant species. Our findings will inform the ongoing development of theory on how short-term shifts in pollinator foraging behavior contribute to the long-term dynamics of plant-pollinator communities.