Category: Ecology

Summary: Finding how much extra nestedness is needed to pull the dominant mutualistic mode back into a pollinator network’s generalist core under strong phenological mismatch.

Plant-pollinator communities are shaped by both seasonal timing and network architecture. This experiment asks whether increasing nestedness can rescue a system whose dominant mode has already been pushed out toward the seasonal fringe by strong phenological mismatch.

The model builds dense symmetric mutualistic operators for pollinator networks and uses GPU iterative deepening to bisect the nestedness threshold where the leading mode returns to the mid-season generalist core. The focus is not only on robustness in the aggregate, but on where the system’s dominant response is localized.

That makes the result a structural rescue threshold for ecological organization. It probes whether nestedness can do more than raise average persistence by actively re-centering the dominant mode of the network under seasonal stress.

Method: GPU dense symmetric eigensolves with iterative deepening and bisection on nestedness in a phenology-mismatched mutualistic operator.

What is measured: Critical nestedness threshold, localization of the dominant mode, core-versus-fringe weighting, and bracket width.