Pollinator Network Robustness

Network

Species per side 10

Nestedness (γ) 2.0

Extinction cascade

Removal order

Live metrics

Connectance C

0.00

Nestedness (NODF)

0.0

Species remaining

20/20

Robustness R

1.00

Plant (surviving)
Pollinator (surviving)
Extinct species

How it works

Plants sit on the top ring, pollinators on the bottom ring. A link exists with probability that falls off as a power of each species' rank, which is exactly how real nested pollination webs are structured (Bascompte et al., PNAS 2003):

p(i,j) = ( 1 - (i/n_p)·(j/n_a) )^γ

n_p, n_a = plant / pollinator counts (ranked generalist → specialist)
γ = nestedness exponent — higher γ concentrates links onto
    a shared "generalist core", exactly the nested pattern
    seen in real meadows

Connectance   C = L / (n_p · n_a)
NODF (approx) = mean pairwise overlap of neighbour sets,
                weighted by degree — measures how much a
                specialist's partners are a subset of a
                generalist's partners

Removing a species can strand its partners with zero remaining links — those go co-extinct too, and the cascade repeats until the network stabilises. Robustness R is the area under the "fraction of species remaining" curve as you remove species one at a time (Memmott, Waser & Price, Proc. R. Soc. B 2004): R = 1 means the web tolerates almost total species loss before collapsing, R → 0 means one removal collapses everything.

Generalists first — removing the best-connected hub species mimics losing honeybees/bumblebees; nested webs are known to be far less robust to this than to random loss.
Specialists first — removing narrow-niche species barely dents the network, because generalists keep pollinating everyone else.

Plants Pollinators

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