On the road: Anthropogenic factors drive the invasion risk of a wild solitary bee species.

Complex biotic networks of invaders and their new environments pose immense challenges for researchers aiming to predict current and future occupancy of introduced species. This might be especially true for invasive bees, as they enter novel trophic interactions. Little attention has been paid to solitary, invasive wild bees, despite their increasing recognition as a potential global threat to biodiversity. Here, we present the first comprehensive species distribution modelling approach targeting the invasive bee Megachile sculpturalis, which is currently undergoing parallel range expansion in North America and Europe. While the species has largely colonised the most highly suitable areas of North America over the past decades, its invasion of Europe seems to be in its early stages. We showed that its current distribution is largely explained by anthropogenic factors, suggesting that its spread is facilitated by road and maritime traffic, largely beyond its intrinsic dispersal ability. Our results suggest that M. sculpturalis is likely to be negatively affected by future climate change in North America, while in Europe the potential suitable areas at-risk of invasion remain equally large. Based on our study, we emphasise the role of expert knowledge for evaluation of ecologically meaningful variables implemented and interpreted for species distribution modelling. We strongly recommend that the monitoring of this and other invasive pollinator species should be prioritised in areas identified as at-risk, alongside development of effective management strategies.

Ecological network complexity scales with area.

Larger geographical areas contain more species-an observation raised to a law in ecology. Less explored is whether biodiversity changes are accompanied by a modification of interaction networks. We use data from 32 spatial interaction networks from different ecosystems to analyse how network structure changes with area. We find that basic community structure descriptors (number of species, links and links per species) increase with area following a power law. Yet, the distribution of links per species varies little with area, indicating that the fundamental organization of interactions within networks is conserved. Our null model analyses suggest that the spatial scaling of network structure is determined by factors beyond species richness and the number of links. We demonstrate that biodiversity-area relationships can be extended from species counts to higher levels of network complexity. Therefore, the consequences of anthropogenic habitat destruction may extend from species loss to wider simplification of natural communities.

A new native plant in the neighborhood: effects on plant-pollinator networks, pollination, and plant reproductive success.

Ecological communities are dynamic entities subjected to extinction/colonization events. Because species are connected through complex interaction networks, the arrival of a new species is likely to affect various species across the community, as observed in plant biological invasions. However, plant invasions usually represent extreme scenarios in which the community is strongly dominated by the alien species, confounding the effects of a change in species composition with a massive increase in floral resource availability. Our study addresses changes in plant community composition involving native species, a common phenomenon under the current climate change scenario in which plants are modifying their distribution ranges. We experimentally manipulated patches of a natural scrubland community by introducing a native plant (henceforth colonizing plant). To avoid introducing a disproportionate amount of floral resources we adjusted the number of flowers of the colonizing plant to the amount of floral resources locally available in each patch. We had two objectives: (1) to analyse the effects of the arrival of a new plant on the pollinator community, the rearrangement of plant-pollinator interactions and the structure of the plant-pollinator network; (2) to evaluate potential consequences for pollination and the reproductive success of resident plant species. The colonizing plant acted as a magnet species, attracting bumble bees and facilitating interactions to other plants through spill-over. The introduction of the colonizing plant also affected the structure of plant-pollinator networks (colonized networks were more generalized and more nested than control networks) and modified the arrangement of plant and pollinator species into modules. Ultimately, these changes resulted in higher heterospecific (but not conspecific) pollen deposition and had contrasting effects on the reproductive success of two resident plant species (higher fruit set and lower seed set, respectively). Our study shows that relationships between plants and pollinators are rapidly rearranged in response to novel situations (even when the new plant is not overly dominant), with important functional consequences on pollination and plant reproductive success. Our study establishes a link between network structure and pollination and plant reproductive success, which may be mediated by differences among pollinator species in foraging behavior.