RESEARCH ARTICLE Tropical Forest Fragmentation Affects Floral Visitors but Not the Structure of Individual- Based Palm-Pollinator Networks

Despite increasing knowledge about the effects of habitat loss on pollinators in natural land-scapes, information is very limited regarding the underlying mechanisms of forest fragmen-tation affecting plant-pollinator interactions in such landscapes. Here, we used a network approach to describe the effects of forest fragmentation on the patterns of interactions in-volving the understory dominant palm Astrocaryummexicanum (Arecaceae) and its floral visitors (including both effective and non-effective pollinators) at the individual level in a Mexican tropical rainforest landscape. Specifically, we asked: (i) Does fragment size affect the structure of individual-based plant-pollinator networks? (ii) Does the core of highly inter-acting visitor species change along the fragmentation size gradient? (iii) Does forest frag-ment size influence the abundance of effective pollinators of A.mexicanum?We found that fragment size did not affect the topological structure of the individual-based palm-pollinator network. Furthermore, while the composition of peripheral non-effective pollinators changed depending on fragment size, effective core generalist species of pollinators remained sta-ble. We also observed that both abundance and variance of effective pollinators of mal