My PhD looked at two invasive plants that has contrasting effects on the native plant-pollinator network. Since then we advanced quite a lot on understanding why superabundant invasive plants with high reward levels can influence others via its shared pollinators, but other less abundant or rewarding exotics don’t. Today, we have a new synthesis paper (Open Access!) formalizing this ideas for any plant species in the network. We analyze lots and lots of plant-pollinator networks to find some generalities. The catch is that we use an index that calculates the potential for one plant to influence another plant. For example, if two plants share only one pollinator and this one do not visit anything else except this two plants, the influence will be very high. On the other hand, if this pollinator also visit lots of other plants, the influence will be lower (see the paper for details). The nice thing is that we can identify some plant traits that make them “influencers”, like plants offering abundant resources and open flowers. It’s a shame that we couldn’t tell (yet?*) if the influence is positive or negative, but at least we can identify key influential plants within the network.

*It may be a way to test for that and at some point we talked about a follow-up, but who knows…