Thursday, August 6, 2020: 12:30 PM-1:00 PM
Organizer:
Julian Resasco
Co-organizers:
Ana Martín González
and
Diego Vazquez
While mutualistic interactions among species are dynamic in space and time, their representation in networks is usually static. By explicitly considering the spatial and temporal dimensions we can obtain a deeper understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes that structure these systems. Such knowledge is fundamental to understand how these networks are impacted by human activities and how they will respond to climate change. Increasingly, ecologists have explored spatiotemporal dynamics of mutualistic networks. This session will showcase current research in this area from ecologists working across various spatial and temporal scales, in various ecosystems, and with different types of mutualistic interactions. Illustrating the range of these scales, one talk will describe how temporal change over minutes affects the opening of flowers and thus the structure plant-pollinator networks as the day unfolds. Another talk will examine how plant-pollinator networks change over a century. Likewise, the scale of spatial extents from the talks will range from a meadow to the entire Earth. This collection of talks will seed a productive discussion toward synthesizing the study of mutualistic networks across scales, an important frontier in ecology.