Persistence of plants and pollinators in the face of habitat loss: Insights from trait-based metacommunity models

Abstract

The loss of natural habitats is one of the main causes of the global decline of biodiversity. Understanding how increasing habitat loss affects ecological processes is critical for mitigating the effects of environmental changes on biodiversity and thus on the supply of ecosystem services by natural habitats. Habitat loss negatively affects pollinator diversity and the pollination service provided by insects, a key ecosystem service supporting the quantity, quality and diversity of crops directly consumed by humans and the sexual reproduction of most flowering plants. By integrating evolutionary relationships among traits that may modulate plant response to habitat loss, the structure of plant ? pollinator interaction networks and metacommunity models, we examine how plant ? pollinator metacommunities might respond to habitat loss. The main predictions of our trait-based metacommunity model are that (1) variation on dispersal ability among plant species may prevent full metacommunity collapse under pollinator loss associated with increasing habitat loss; (2) habitat loss may select for plants with higher dispersal ability and higher autogamous self-pollination, and will typically decrease the incidence of pollination generalist plants; (3) metacommunities that comprise plants with high autonomous self-pollination ability may harbour higher richness of rare plant species when pollinator diversity declines with increased habitat loss. We discuss the implications of our results for the vulnerability of pollination services for biotically pollinated wild plants and crops co-occurring in human-dominated landscapes.