Description:

Dr Lauren Ponisio from UC Riverside, "Understanding the landscape and species characteristics that promote population and community resistance is essential for predicting the impacts of global change. Focusing on plant-pollinator communities, I examine how landscapes with diverse fire histories, or high pyrodiversity, shape the structure of interaction networks, and the resulting impacts on community resistance to co-extinction cascades. I also test whether pyrodiversity, by providing the biotic infrastructure for species to change their partners and network roles, enables species to respond to drought-induced changes in community composition. I find that before an extreme drought event, pyrodiversity promotes the functional complementarity and redundancy of interactions, though this does not translate to higher resistance to co-extinction cascades. In addition, species with higher interaction flexibility in more pyrodiverse areas are able to maintain their populations after an extreme drought event. This study provides one of the first empirical tests of the importance of ecological network structure in determining resistance to a perturbation and how landscape characteristics influence interaction patterns. "