Phenological mismatches and the demography of solitary bees.

Species respond idiosyncratically to environmental variation, which may generate phenological mismatches. We assess the consequences of such mismatches for solitary bees. During 9 years, we studied flowering phenology and nesting phenology and demography of five wood-nesting solitary bee species representing a broad gradient of specialization/generalization in the use of floral resources.

The strength of plant-pollinator interactions.

Recent studies of plant-animal mutualistic networks have assumed that interaction frequency between mutualists predicts species impacts (population-level effects), and that field estimates of interaction strength (per-interaction effects) are unnecessary. Although existing evidence supports this assumption for the effect of animals on plants, no studies have evaluated it for the reciprocal effect of plants on animals. We evaluate this assumption using data on the reproductive effects of pollinators on plants and the reciprocal reproductive effects of plants on pollinators.

Evaluating sampling completeness in a desert plant-pollinator network.

1. The study of plant-pollinator interactions in a network context is receiving increasing attention. This approach has helped to identify several emerging network patterns such as nestedness and modularity.

Rareness and specialization in plant-pollinator networks.

Most rare species appear to be specialists in plant-pollinator networks. This observation could result either from real ecological processes or from sampling artifacts. Several methods have been proposed to overcome these artifacts, but they have the limitation of being based on visitation data, causing interactions involving rare visitor species to remain undersampled.