Category: Ecology

Summary: Estimating how much seasonal mismatch a plant-pollinator network can absorb before its main growth mode shifts away from a mid-season generalist core.

Plant-pollinator networks often rely on a relatively small set of generalist species whose seasonal overlap helps stabilize the wider community. This experiment asks when phenological mismatch becomes large enough that this core stops dominating the network and peripheral, poorly synchronized species take over the leading mode instead.

The model builds dense symmetric mutualistic operators with seasonal structure and then uses iterative deepening and repeated eigensolves across increasing system sizes. Rather than only asking whether the network remains viable, it tracks whether the leading mode stays concentrated in the mid-season generalist core or collapses toward the phenological fringe.

That focus makes the experiment an early-warning study of structural failure. It targets the point where mutualistic organization breaks down before a simpler persistence metric would necessarily show complete collapse.

Method: Dense symmetric eigensolves with iterative deepening across N=64 to 2048 to bisect the phenological-mismatch threshold.

What is measured: Critical mismatch threshold, leading-mode localization, fringe versus core dominance, eigenvalue behavior, and bracket width.