Adaptive foraging of pollinators fosters gradual tipping under resource competition and rapid environmental change
Fig 7
Adaptability and resource congestion affect hysteretic patterns and the viability of plant-pollinator networks.
For adaptive pollinators, intermediate levels of resource congestion increase the overall persistence of ecological networks. The point of collapse and recovery of pollinator species increases as a function of resource congestion q without (A) and with adaptive foraging (B). For low resource congestion, the system possesses bistable states which disappear after a critical value of the resource congestion. Resource congestion also affects the feasibility of the networks—networks for which all 15 plant and 35 pollinator species survive under no stress. An intermediate level of resource congestion is required for the adaptive model to produce feasible networks. The orange arrows indicate the resource congestion strength q chosen for the simulation of Figs 2 and 3. These values were chosen such that the systems possess bistable states—as observed in the non-overlapping points of collapse and recovery—and have a high fraction of feasibility. For low resource congestion, adaptability increases the range of drivers of decline at which pollinator communities do not collapse, increasing resilience in the Holling sense [41]. (A) ν = 1 and (B) ν = 0.7. The results are averaged over 100 networks per value of resource congestion q with the error bars showing the standard deviation. Other parameters in Table A in S1 Text.