Interaction frequency as a surrogate for the total effect of animal mutualists on plants

By D. P. Vázquez, W. Morris, Pedro Jordano. 2005

569 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We evaluate whether species interaction frequency can be used as a surrogate for the total effect of a species on another. Because interaction frequency is easier to estimate than per-interaction effect, using interaction frequency as a surrogate of total effect could facilitate the large-scale analysis of quantitative patterns of species-rich interaction networks. We show mathematically that the correlation between interaction frequency (I ) and total effect (T ) becomes more strongly positive the greater the variation of I relative to the variation of per-interaction effect (P ) and the greater the correlation between I and P. A meta-analysis using data on I, P and T for animal pollinators and seed dispersers visiting plants shows a generally strong, positive relationship between T and I, in spite of no general relationship between P and I. Thus, frequent animal mutualists usually contribute the most to plant reproduction, regardless of their effectiveness on a per-interaction basis.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83a5e76aff5bacbb4873f2451f531f7ef2e9adf0

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Non-bee insects are important contributors to global crop pollination (2015, unknown): “our results are consistent with other studies that have found that visitation frequency drives the overall function provided by a species, because the variance across species in their flower visitation is much larger than the variance in per-visit function (28, 58).”
Do sown flower strips boost wild pollinator abundance and pollination services in a spring-flowering crop? A case study from UK cider apple orchards (2017, background): “496 High interaction frequency is an integral component of pollinator effectiveness 497 (Vázquez et al. 2005), and wild insects were observed at much higher visit 498 frequencies (83% of visits to apple flowers) in orchards than honeybees.”
Variation in seed dispersal effectiveness: the redundancy of consequences in diversified tropical frugivore assemblages (2016, unknown): “…of each of the three subcomponents of the QC (number of visits 10 h 1 , fruits manipulated per visit and dispersal probability), we first estimated the relative dispersal contribution of each bird species as the proportion of the total QC contributed by each species (Vázquez et al. 2005).”
Towards novel approaches to modelling biotic interactions in multispecies assemblages at large spatial extents (2012, background): “In mutualistic interactions such as plant–frugivore and plant–pollinator networks, interaction frequencies are often considered to be surrogates for interaction strengths (Vázquez et al., 2005; Scotti et al., 2007).”
Why network analysis is often disconnected from community ecology: A critique and an ecologist's guide (2010, background): “when the contribution of different pollinator species to the pollination success of a plant is examined (Vázquez et al., 2005).”
Species abundance and asymmetric interaction strength in ecological networks (2007, methodology): “As in Vázquez et al. (2005b), the speciesspecific probabilities were proportional to species’ relative abundances (probabilities are in fact approximately proportional and not equal to relative abundances because of the requirement that each species receives at least one interaction; this…”
Abundance of common species, not species richness, drives delivery of a real-world ecosystem service. (2015, background): “The likely mechanism for the greater importance of visitation rate as compared with per-visit pollen deposition is the larger variance of the former, as found by V azquez et al. (2005). Lastly, we explored a possible mechanism through which functionally dominant species could cause both the weak ric”
Crop flower visitation by honeybees, bumblebees and solitary bees: Behavioural differences and diversity responses to landscape (2013, background): “This follows on from the assumption that the more flowers visited by an individual bee so the greater the likelihood of pollen transfer (Vazquez et al., 2005; Richards et al., 2009).”