Tag Archives: Science

Could LLMs like ChatGPT ever replace part of the academic peer-review process?

Recently, I made a comment over on Steve Heard’s Scientist Sees Squirrel blog:

I have never published a paper that’s not been improved, to some degree, by peer review, and broadly the system works. But I do wonder if it’s sustainable in the long-term and whether in the future LLMs might actually be a more effective way of assessing manuscripts. I recognise that’s (currently) a controversial statement to make – but having recently run a few of my own manuscripts through ChatGPT and asked for its “opinion”, I can honestly say that the feedback has improved not just the writing but also the framing and focus of the work. It’s also picked up weaknesses and errors that I had otherwise missed.

That initiated an email conversation with Steve which resulted in me running a short experiment with ChatGPT model 5.5. I first loaded up the original manuscript that I’d submitted to a journal of this paper on pollinator effectiveness. I then asked ChatGPT to write a review of the manuscript as though it was a peer reviewer of the journal. Which it did – in some detail – in 28 seconds! If anyone is interested I can send them that review, but it’s the next bit that I think is especially interesting.

After ChatGPT had completed the review, I then uploaded the actual peer reviews I’d received from the journal, plus the editor’s comments, and asked it to summarise the degree to which its review agreed with those I had received.

Below I have copied the response, but it’s the take-home message, summarised in the graphic above, which I think is the most intriguing aspect: there was a 55% agreement with Reviewer 1, a 70% agreement with Reviewer 2, and a 65% overall agreement between ChatGPT’s assessment of the manuscript and that of the Editor.

That may not sound like a large overlap, but note that it’s the level of agreement between the two reviewers was only 65%! In my not inconsiderable experience (>130 peer reviewed papers and chapters, hundreds of peer reviews of my own) this is fairly typical – reviewers ALWAYS pick up on different strengths and weaknesses in a manuscript!

What particularly impressed me about ChatGPT’s response below, is that it went far beyond simply looking at the language being used, it provided a critique of how the study was conducted, how data were analysed, and the conclusions drawn. Which is just what we expect a human reviewer to do! Not only that, but it was more critical of the work than the reviewers and the editor.

So where does this leave us? Could Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT replace part of the academic peer-review process? Clearly there need to be guide rails and human agency involved in final decisions, but I think that, yes, they may well have a role to play in the not-too-distant future. As always, I’d be interested in your comments.

If you want to dive into this more deeply, here’s the verbatim account of what ChatGPT wrote (including its emboldened parts) when I asked how much agreement there was between its assessment and those of the other two reviewers and the editor:

There is a fair amount of overlap, but not a perfect match.

I would say my review was moderately similar in substance, but noticeably more critical in tone and in editorial recommendation. The strongest areas of convergence were on the paper’s core strengths and on one key statistical concern. The biggest mismatch is that the actual editor and reviewers were much more positive overall, and most of their requested changes are closer to clarification, presentation, and framing than to a deep challenge to the paper’s publishability.

The clearest points of agreement are these. First, I highlighted the manuscript’s strengths as the multi-year design, the focus on different functional groups, and the interesting role of Lepidoptera; that aligns very closely with the guest editor, who explicitly says that “the roles of lepidopterans, the inclusion of flight distance measures, and the multi-year study are particularly notable,” and with Reviewer 2, who lists the multi-year field study, multiple pollinator groups, and the unexpected importance of Lepidoptera as strengths. Second, I flagged the Poisson treatment of an ordinal flight-distance variable as statistically weak; Reviewer 1 independently makes essentially the same point and explicitly recommends ordinal regression instead. Third, I thought the discussion was somewhat over-extended and not always tightly aligned with the evidence; Reviewer 2 likewise suggests embedding the work better in the broader literature and moving some material out of the conclusion into the discussion.

There is also a partial overlap around the manuscript’s central interpretation. I argued that the paper sometimes pushes too hard from pollen deposition and coarse movement classes to larger claims about true generalisation, outcrossing value, and broader evolutionary or environmental buffering. The editor does not object to those broad claims in the same way; instead, the editor actually asks for the discussion to connect the results more explicitly to the theoretical statement that plants should generalise on equally effective pollinators under dynamic environments, and even invites discussion of anthropogenic disturbance and future interactions. In other words, where I wanted that interpretive arc toned down, the editor mostly wanted it better developed and better supported.

The main differences are quite important.

First, I was more sceptical about inference than the real reviewers were. I was worried that the manuscript moved too quickly from non-significant or coarse flight-distance patterns to statements about butterfly superiority, reduced geitonogamy, and broader adaptive significance. Reviewer 1 only objected narrowly to the modelling choice; neither reviewer makes my broader inferential critique, and the editor seems broadly comfortable with the interpretive direction so long as it is supported with more descriptive data and clearer exposition.

Second, I was more concerned about the coarse pooling of visitor taxa. I thought the manuscript should be more cautious because “butterflies,” “hoverflies,” “bumblebees,” and especially “Others” are broad bins. The actual comments do touch this, but in a softer, more taxonomic way: the editor asks whether there is a species or morphotype list, and Reviewer 2 asks for more detail on the butterfly taxa and justification for putting solitary bees into “Others.” That is related to my concern, but it is narrower and more presentational than the conceptual objection I raised.

Third, I did not anticipate how much of the real feedback would focus on descriptive content and figures. The editor repeatedly asks for more floral biology data, clearer results presentation, more absolute numbers, more behavioural quantification, clearer site description, and better figure design and consistency. Reviewer 2 similarly asks for effect sizes, better figures, units, and clearer display of the underlying data distribution. I mentioned presentational issues only in a general way; the actual reports are much more detailed and concrete here.

Fourth, I did not raise the absence of random effects, whereas Reviewer 2 does. That is probably the single most important substantive point that I missed. Reviewer 2 specifically asks why insect individual and/or observation day were not modelled as random effects.

Fifth, my editorial recommendation was harsher. I recommended major revision. The actual reports read much more like minor-to-moderate revision. The editor calls it “an excellent piece of work” and says it is well executed with robust methodology; Reviewer 2 says they have “little to criticise,” mostly editorial suggestions plus a few statistical and figure issues; Reviewer 1 has only a short list of points. That collective tone is clearly more encouraging than mine.

So, in condensed form:

Where I matched well: multi-year dataset as a major strength; Lepidoptera result as a notable contribution; the Poisson-for-ordinal issue; some concern that discussion/framing needed tightening.
Where I was too severe: I treated the interpretive overreach as a major obstacle, whereas the real reviewers mostly saw a strong paper needing clarification and enrichment rather than retrenchment.
What I underplayed or missed: requests for more descriptive natural history and floral biology data, much more detailed figure/presentation criticism, and the random-effects issue.

My bottom-line judgement is that my review was directionally right on some key scientific points, especially the statistical issue and the general strengths, but too pessimistic about the paper’s editorial position. If I had seen these reports first, I would have shifted from “major revision because the evidence-conclusion fit is shaky” to something more like “moderate revision: good paper, but it needs clearer descriptive support, better figure presentation, and tighter statistical justification. If revised along those lines, I think the manuscript could become a credible and interesting contribution”.

Here is a concise version of the editorial decision in journal-review language:

This manuscript addresses an interesting and worthwhile question using a useful multi-year dataset and a stronger-than-usual measure of pollinator performance. However, the current version over-interprets some of the results, particularly those concerning movement behaviour, outcrossing implications, and the broader adaptive significance of generalised pollination. The statistical treatment of flight distance is also not fully convincing. I therefore recommend major revision. The manuscript has clear potential, but its conclusions need to be more tightly aligned with what the data actually demonstrate.

What the COVID lockdowns taught us about plant-pollinator specialisation in gardens

1 Reply

One of the few positive things to come out of the COVID lockdowns was the unexpected opportunity to look much more closely at the nature right outside our doors. In 2020 I coordinated the Lockdown Gardens initiative, bringing together pollination ecologists from around the world to carry out standardised surveys of flower visitors in the gardens they could access during that strange and constrained period. That project generated an unusually rich global dataset: 67 gardens, almost 47,000 flower visits, and records from more than 650 pollinator species.

Since then, the dataset has started to yield some really interesting insights. A new paper led by Luis Perugini uses the Lockdown Gardens data to ask a deceptively simple question: what determines how specialised plant–pollinator interactions are in gardens? In other words, are garden flowers in some places visited by a narrow set of pollinators, while elsewhere they are more generalist?

The answers are not quite what we expected. Looking at 40 garden networks from four continents, we found that larger gardens support more plant species, and that suburban gardens tended to be richer in plant species than either rural or urban gardens. We also found that pollinator richness increased with plant richness and with precipitation. But when it came to the actual specialisation of interactions, climate and species richness did not seem to matter very much at all. Instead, variation in specialisation was mostly species-specific and showed no clear phylogenetic pattern.

That’s an important result, because it suggests that the factors that drive biodiversity in gardens are not necessarily the same factors that shape the ecological relationships within those gardens. Put more simply: having more species does not automatically mean having more specialised interactions.

For me, this is a nice example of how a project born out of a global crisis can continue to produce useful science. The Lockdown Gardens surveys began as an improvised response to an extraordinary moment, but the data are now helping us to understand how gardens function as ecological systems, and how they might better support pollinators in an increasingly human-dominated world.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the paper, which is open access:

Perugini, L., Rech, A., Ollerton, J. & Jorge, L. (2026) Global drivers of plant-pollinator interaction specialization in gardens. Ecology and Evolution (in press)

Edible Apocynaceae: a new global synthesis of diversity, conservation and pollination just published – and a personal landmark for me!

2 Replies

This year – 2026 – marks the 40th anniversary of my first publication. Forty years. Imagine that – I certainly can’t! It feels like a long time ago, a distant memory, another life. I was 21 and I hadn’t even begun my undergraduate degree. After a less-than-successful time at school I decided to complete a Higher National Diploma (HND) qualification in Applied Biology at Sunderland Polytechnic (now the University of Sunderland) that I hoped would get me a place on a degree course. As it turned out, it did, but during my HND I completed a research project which (with the encouragement of my then supervisor, the late cactus expert Geoff Swales*), was subsequently published in December 1986 as “Adaptation to arid environments in the Asclepiadaceae” in the British Cactus and Succulent Journal.

That was the modest start of a botanical love affair with asclepiads (now subsumed into the family Apocynaceae) that has persisted to this day and resulted in over 20 research papers, chapters, and more general articles, plus appearances in both of my books.

The latest of these papers is published today and, as well as being a 40 year milestone for me, it’s a paper that I am inordinately proud of, as it represents an amazing coalescence of ethnobotany, taxonomy, conservation, biogeography, cultural science, and pollination ecology. And I managed to sneak in a citation of the 1986 paper that started the whole thing!

This paper is the first global review of the diversity of edible species in a family that is usually considered to be highly toxic and produces a lot of sticky latex to deter herbivores. Yet that reputation turns out to be only part of the story. Our survey found no fewer than 440 edible species of Apocynaceae worldwide, which works out at about 7.7% of the family (and is definitely an under-estimate). They occur across all of the major evolutionary lineages of the family, and in most of the main biogeographic regions where these plants grow.

What people eat is also far more varied than you might expect. Fruits are the commonest edible part, but roots and tubers are also important, and in different places people consume leaves, stems, flowers, nectar, latex, bark and even wood ash used as a condiment. That diversity is not random: our analyses show clear phylogenetic and geographic patterning in which parts are eaten. In other words, both evolutionary history and regional cultural practices help to shape how Apocynaceae are used as food.

One especially interesting result is that edible Apocynaceae appear, on current evidence, to be less threatened than non-edible members of the family. But that comes with a big health warning: more than 80% of species, edible or otherwise, have never been properly assessed for conservation status. So there is still a huge amount that we do not know.

The same is true for pollination. Many of these plants depend on animal pollinators to produce the fruits and seeds that people eat, yet pollination data are missing for most edible species, including about 90% of those whose edible parts are directly pollinator-dependent.

For me, that is one of the most striking messages of the paper. Hidden inside a family best known for poisons and medicinal compounds is a substantial, globally distributed food resource, much of it tied to local knowledge and wild harvesting. It is a reminder that botanical and cultural diversity, conservation, and pollination ecology are all bound up together. And, as a nice bonus, the study even uncovered an unexpected taxonomic surprise in China, where one edible species turned out to belong in an entirely new genus, Kushengia. The edible flowers of Kushengia sinensis are shown in the image at the top of this post – lightly boiled, stir fried with garlic, and thoroughly delicious!

Here’s the reference with a link to the paper, which is unfortunately pay-walled. If anyone wants a copy, send me a request via my Contact page:

Ollerton, J., Albuquerque-Lima, S., Liede-Schumann, S., Galetto, L., Endress, M.E., Forster, P.I., Torres, C., Fishbein, M. & Ren, Z.X. (2026) Edible Apocynaceae: phylogeny, biogeography, conservation and pollination insights from a global synthesis. Taxon 75: e70131

*It goes without saying that I’m incredibly grateful to Geoff and the other teachers and supervisors who, during the course of my education, encouraged me in my studies. During one lab session with Geoff we were each given a cactus seed and asked to study it under a microscope and draw it. Afterwards I pocketed the seed, took it home, and germinated it. That cactus – a specimen of Parodia (Notocactus) mammulosus – is still growing on my windowsill, a living reminder of a great mentor.

Monkey business at the SCAPE conference

7 Replies

I’d like to tell you about a dream that I had last night. As far as I can recall this is the first time I’ve mentioned my dreams in about 14 years of regular blogging. I dream almost every night: vivid, highly immersive, realistic, often weird, sometimes scary, frequently funny dreams that, each morning, I can usually recall in some detail. That’s always been the case, ever since I was a small child.

If I drink beer or eat blue cheese my dreams become stronger and weirder, presumably because of the chemicals produced by the hops (which belong to the same plant family as cannabis) or the fungi. But regardless of what I ingest, I’m almost guaranteed to dream.

Last night’s dream involved the SCAPE meeting. In the dream, some colleagues had submitted the abstract for a talk at the conference and, when I checked it, I discovered that it was full of spelling and grammatical errors. So I did what I normally do – I started to revise the document. Suddenly, I found myself at the said conference and my colleagues were telling me not to change anything because it had been written by the first author – a gorilla* called Merrill.

I started to argue that, regardless of our semi-literate co-author, we ought to make some corrections, when Merrill looked at me with his big, dark, doleful eyes. So I reached over and scratched his head, which he seemed to enjoy. I can still recall the texture of his short, wiry hair under my fingers, because at that exact moment I woke up thinking…..WTF?!

Dreams such as this often have some basis in things I’ve seen or read about or done, so I spent the morning thinking about what could have prompted it. And I believe that I know what it was. There’s been a lot of discussion recently about scientific paper authorship and responsibility – not least in the context of AI – and I’ve seen stories about research papers with non-humans, such as pets, as co-authors. So was my brain sublimating these ideas into a fantasy about having a gorilla as a co-author? Who knows. It was an amusing way to spend my sleeping hours, though.

*Before anyone comments that “gorillas are apes, they’re not monkeys, the title of your post is incorrect”, I’d like to point out that, phylogenetically speaking, apes (including ourselves) ARE monkeys in the sense that they (we) are nested within that larger grouping of primates.

Help us uncover the hidden lives of Europe’s ground-nesting bees

Leave a reply

When most people think about pollinators, they picture bees visiting flowers. But for many species, a large part of life happens elsewhere: in the soil. Many pollinators do not just feed above ground, they also nest, shelter or develop below it

Discovering more about this aspect of pollinator life histories is the focus of ProPollSoil, a major new European research project exploring the links between soil health and pollinator health that kicked off last year. I’m excited to be part of it because the soil component of pollinator ecology and conservation is important but often overlooked.

As part of ProPollSoil, we are asking the public to help us find and document ground-nesting bees through a citizen science initiative called EuroBeeSoil. If you spot a bee nest in soil, sand, a lawn, a path edge or a sunlit bank, you can photograph it and upload your record to iNaturalist.

It’s a simple idea, but potentially a very powerful one. These observations will help us understand where bees are nesting, what kinds of soils they use, and how we can better conserve them.

We often talk about pollinator-friendly flowers. But bees need more than food, they also need somewhere to live. For many species, that means the ground beneath our feet.

So please follow this link and consider how you might take part if you can. You do not need to be a bee expert. You just need to look down a little more often.

Pollinator decline for legal professionals – a new article explains this complex and important issue

Leave a reply

Oxford University Press recently commissioned me to write a piece for their Expert Essentials series, which is designed to give legal professionals an overview of complex topics that increasingly affect their clients, their sectors, and the regulatory landscape in which they operate. My contribution, on pollinator decline, has now been published. That might seem an unusual topic for lawyers at first glance. Pollinators are usually framed as part of a conservation story: bees, butterflies, hoverflies, birds, bats and other animals that help flowering plants to reproduce. But as I argue in the article, pollinator decline is no longer just an ecological issue. It is becoming a legal, financial, and governance issue too.

Why should the legal profession care? Because pollinators sit right at the intersection of biodiversity loss, food security, business risk, and emerging regulation. Many of the crops that underpin global supply chains depend on animal pollination, especially fruits, nuts, oilseeds, coffee, and cocoa. If pollination services become less reliable, then yields can fall, costs can rise, and supply chains can become more fragile. That matters not only to farmers and food companies, but also to the lawyers advising businesses on disclosure, due diligence, liability, investment risk, and long-term resilience. As the article explains, pollinator decline has moved from being a “silent natural problem” to a boardroom issue with concrete legal hooks.

This shift is being driven in part by the rapid development of biodiversity-related reporting frameworks and regulatory expectations. Companies are increasingly expected to understand both how they depend upon nature and how they affect it. Pollinators are a particularly good example of this “double materiality”. A business may depend on pollinators for the crops and raw materials it sources, while also contributing to pollinator decline through land-use change, pesticide use, pollution, or habitat destruction. Under emerging sustainability and disclosure frameworks, that is no longer something that can be waved away as somebody else’s problem.

The legal implications are broad. They include advice on compliance with biodiversity reporting rules, contracts and due diligence across supply chains, litigation and liability relating to environmental harm, and the interpretation of new standards around nature-related risk. My article discusses frameworks such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and associated standards, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. Together, these are helping to pull biodiversity, including pollinators, out of the margins of environmental discussion and into mainstream conversations about governance, accountability, and fiduciary responsibility.

What makes this especially important for legal professionals and others is that pollinator decline is not caused by one simple factor. It is driven by a web of interacting pressures: habitat loss, agricultural intensification, pesticides, diseases, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. That complexity makes it difficult to regulate neatly, but also impossible to ignore. For lawyers, this is precisely the kind of scientifically complex, economically significant, and legally fast-moving issue that is becoming more common in the age of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting, biodiversity disclosure, and nature-related financial risk.

In other words, this is not about turning lawyers into ecologists. It is about ensuring that legal professionals understand enough of the science to advise clients intelligently in a world where biodiversity loss is becoming embedded in regulation, reporting, corporate strategy, and litigation. Pollinators may be small, but the consequences of losing them are anything but.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the article:

Ollerton, J. (2026) Pollinator decline: a global issue with social, legal, and economic implications. In: Kimutai, J. & O’Donovan, C. (eds), Environmental Science; in De Silva, S. et al. (eds), Expert Essentials (Oxford, online edn, Oxford Law Pro) https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198972877.003.0080.

Here’s the abstract:

This article aims to equip legal professionals with an understanding of pollinator decline, why this is important to business and finance, and the relevant emerging standards and regulatory frameworks. Pollinators – including insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals – are essential to the reproduction of most flowering plants and underpin global food production, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. Global evidence shows that many pollinator populations are declining, raising concerns that extend well beyond conservation into agriculture, business, and the economy. These declines are driven by multiple interacting pressures, including habitat loss, intensive land use, pesticide exposure, parasites and diseases, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. No single factor is responsible, and responses must therefore be systemic. Pollinators support the yields and quality of many food crops, particularly fruits, nuts, and seeds that are central to human nutrition, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars annually to global agricultural output. Yet pollinators are often overlooked in risk assessments, despite growing evidence that their decline can disrupt supply chains, increase production costs, and weaken ecosystem services. Monitoring data reveal mixed but troubling trends, though data gaps remain substantial, complicating assessment and response. Regardless of uncertainties, pollinator decline is increasingly relevant to law and governance. Emerging global and regional frameworks – including biodiversity targets, sustainability reporting standards, and nature-related disclosure initiatives – are bringing pollinators into corporate reporting, due diligence, and liability discussions. As a result, pollinators are no longer solely an ecological concern, but a material issue for businesses, investors, and legal professionals navigating sustainability, disclosure, and long-term risk.

Book review: “The Ecology of Ecologists” by Jeremy Fox

1 Reply

There are probably few people who have thought more about what it means to be an academic ecologist than Jeremy Fox, Professor of Ecology at the University of Calgary in Canada. The Dynamic Ecology blog that he founded, and to which he makes most of the contributions, has long been a source of useful information and statistics on where the field is going and how to navigate its churning waters. As one of the blog’s regular readers and occasional commentators, I was excited when Jeremy announced that he was distilling his thoughts on ecology into a book. The result is named The Ecology of Ecologists, with the subtitle: Harnessing Diverse Approaches for a Stronger Science.

The fact that the name emerged following a plea by Jeremy to the blog readership really hints at the tone of the book: to him, ecology is a big tent with space for everyone, and where everyone can contribute. That’s a fresh and important point of view at a time when science is too restricted (in my opinion) by bandwagons, hobby horses, high-impact journal culture, institutional elitism, and both written and unwritten strictures about The Right Way To Be Doing A Thing (I’m looking at you, methodological dogmatists).

The Ecology of Ecologists opens with the premise set out in the Introduction: “Ecologists Disagree on What Ecology Is and How to Do It. Good.”, and develops this into a broad reflection on The Diversity of Ecology itself. Jeremy argues that the field’s strength lies not despite but because of its pluralism, exploring The Benefits of Diversity, in Nature and in Ecology through ideas such as Complementarity and Selection, and showing how different perspectives, methods, and even personalities can contribute to scientific progress. This theme extends into Diverse Tools for Diverse Jobs: The Many Uses of Mathematical Models and Fighting Lack of Diversity: The Value of Contrarians, where methodological variety and dissent are treated as essential rather than problematic features of ecological science. As someone “whose scientific work is characterized by a self-confessed contrarian streak”, according to one review of my book Birds & Flowers, I found that last chapter especially interesting.

Jeremy writes engagingly about the subject to which he’s devoted his life and there are some great quotable lines in the book. My favourite (which I’m hoping to use in a forthcoming paper, if the reviewers allow) is:

There’s almost literally no such thing as an “unusual” or “weird” empirical result in ecology…So shouldn’t our preexisting expectation about the effect of x on y always be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Are there any weaknesses to The Ecology of Ecologists? There are a few areas that I would have liked to have seen explored in more detail, for example the different approaches to ecology adopted by diverse cultures (e.g. Asian versus Western) or people coming at ecology from botanical versus zoological backgrounds, for instance. The value of large collaborative science in which different people bring their specialisms could have been discussed more fully. Ecology as a profession outside of academia is also not considered, which I think is a missed opportunity. Many graduates and post-docs go on to work for NGOs, government departments, and consultancies, and when given the opportunity to collaborate on the science, they bring a lot to the table.

I was also surprised to see no mention of how AI/LLMs might impact the field, which is a growing topic on Dynamic Ecology. In a future edition I could imagine an interesting coda to the Selection chapter where, at the end, Jeremy hopes that “in the future, selection against ineffective approaches [to studying ecology] can proceed a bit more quickly”. I can certainly see a role for LLMs in that respect, and we can learn a lot from the climate and meteorology fields.

In summary, The Ecology of Ecologists is a thoughtful and timely reflection on what ecology is and why its apparent untidiness is one of its greatest strengths. Drawing on decades of research and ideas developed through Dynamic Ecology, Jeremy invites us to embrace ecology not as a single, unified enterprise but as a discipline defined by methodological, conceptual, and intellectual diversity. Rather than seeing the field’s mix of scales, questions, and approaches as a problem to be solved, he argues that this plurality is precisely what gives ecology its resilience and explanatory power. His central message is both reassuring and challenging: no single way of “doing ecology” has a monopoly on truth, and progress depends on ecologists better understanding — and valuing — how differently their colleagues think and work.

The book is written accessibly enough for advanced students, but will be especially rewarding for professional ecologists who have wrestled with the field’s internal debates. I highly recommend it!

What China’s mountain meadows and forests can teach us about pollinators

Leave a reply

For several years now I have been fortunate to collaborate with colleagues in China on the ecology of plant–pollinator interactions. One of the things that makes that work so exciting is the sheer variety of landscapes in which these interactions play out. In a newly published paper led by Dr Xin Xu, we have studied pollination networks on Yulong Snow Mountain in Yunnan, in south-west China, a place where forests and flower-rich meadows sit side by side in a spectacular high-elevation environment.

The question we asked was simple enough: how do these adjacent habitats – woodland and grassland – differ in the way that plants and pollinators interact? But answering it required a huge amount of field effort. Over two flowering seasons, the team recorded more than 11,000 interactions between 229 pollinating insect species and 89 flowering plant species. That is an extraordinary reminder of how much ecological complexity can be packed into a relatively small area of mountain landscape.

What emerged was a very clear pattern. The open meadows supported far more activity than the neighbouring forests: more visits, more pollinator species, more plant species, and more interaction links. In fact, nearly 9,700 of the recorded interactions took place in meadow habitat, compared with about 1,365 in forest. Meadows were especially important for bumblebees, which are among the key pollinators in these cool, high-elevation systems.

But the forests were not simply poor relations. They supported their own distinctive subset of the wider pollinator community, and the network of interactions there was structured differently. Some pollinator species altered their daily foraging schedules depending on whether they were in meadow or forest, suggesting that they are responding flexibly to changes in light, temperature, floral resources, and perhaps competition. That is one of the aspects of pollination ecology that fascinates me most: these are not static systems, but living networks that shift across space and time.

More broadly, the study reinforces something that has become increasingly clear from ecological research: habitat heterogeneity matters. A landscape made up of different, connected habitat types can support a richer and more resilient community than one that is uniform. On Yulong Snow Mountain, the meadows seem to act as hotspots of pollinator diversity, while the forests add further complexity and help shape how those pollinators behave. Conserving that mosaic is therefore likely to be crucial if we want to maintain pollination services and biodiversity in mountain regions facing rapid environmental change.

For me personally, this paper is also a reminder of why international collaboration is so valuable. Working with Chinese colleagues has opened a window onto ecological systems that are both scientifically important and visually stunning. Yunnan is one of the world’s great biodiversity regions, and studying pollination there helps us understand not only how these mountain ecosystems function, but also how species interactions may respond to climate change and habitat alteration in the future.

Pollination ecology is about more than just bees, birds, or other animals visiting flowers. As a focus of study, it is much richer. It is about networks of interactions, about the timing of activity through the day, about the way species respond to different habitats, and about how whole ecosystems are stitched together. High on a Chinese mountain, among meadows and forests, we can see that complexity in action.

Here’s the full reference:

Xu, X., Maruyama, P.K., Ollerton, J., Wang, H. & Ren, Z.-X. (2026) Spatio-temporal variation in plant–pollinator networks between adjacent meadow and forest habitats in a high-elevation environment. Oecologia (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Understanding how habitat heterogeneity influences the structure and stability of ecological networks is critical for predicting ecosystem responses to environmental change. In alpine ecosystems, open meadows and forests represent contrasting habitats with distinct vegetation structures, resource availability, and microclimatic conditions. In this study, we integrated spatial and temporal data on pollinator-plant interactions to investigate network structure, species roles, and diurnal foraging dynamics across meadow and surrounding forest habitats during two flowering seasons on Yulong Snow Mountain, Yunnan, China. A total of 11,094 plant–pollinator interactions were recorded, involving 229 pollinator and 89 flowering plant species. Meadows supported significantly higher interaction frequencies, species richness, and α-diversity for both plants and pollinators, although they showed a striking numerical dominance of a single key pollinator, Bombus friseanus. Network dissimilarity analyses revealed substantial differences between habitats, with both species turnover and rewiring contributing to interaction dissimilarity. Diurnal foraging dynamic analysis revealed that some key species, such as Bombus lepidus, displayed distinct foraging patterns across habitats indicating behavioral adaptation and temporal niche partitioning to microclimate. Our findings highlight the strong influence of habitat type on pollination network architecture and reveal many shared pollinator species, indicating some degree of cross-habitat linkage. These results underscore the importance of habitat heterogeneity and spatial coupling in shaping pollination services and sustaining biodiversity in mountain ecosystems under environmental change.

Join me for two webinars exploring the links between biodiversity, pollinators and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Leave a reply

The diversity of life on Earth, and the interactions between the species that make up that diversity, are fundamentally important to the functioning of ecosystems and to human well-being. Yet these connections are often poorly appreciated, despite the fact that biodiversity supports everything from food production and clean water to climate resilience and human health.

At the end of March and the end of May I will be presenting two lunchtime webinars which explore this as part of the Biological Recording Company’s Skills for Ecology series. These talks will look at how biodiversity in general, and plant–pollinator interactions in particular, connect to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), showing why the conservation of nature is central to a just, healthy, and sustainable future.

Here are the dates and the links for booking:

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

The global relationship between flowering plant and pollinator diversity…and what they don’t tell you about posting preprints!

3 Replies

Last week I posted a preprint on the platform Research Square of a new manuscript entitled “The global relationship between flowering plant and pollinator diversity holds true across scales, latitude, and human influence” – follow that link to access a copy. The study is a collaboration with more than thirty colleagues and it develops some ideas that have been chugging around in my head for a number of years. It’s been reviewed and we’re at the stage of undertaking the revisions. I’m very excited to see it out in one form or another!

As far as I can recall this is the first time that I’ve been the lead author on a study that’s been posted as a preprint and I was not prepared for what happened after it went live on 2nd March!

Since then I’ve received over 30 invitations from journals to submit the paper for publication. Obviously, most (all?) of these are automated, because the majority are for journals that are in no way suitable, e.g., Insights of Herbal Medicine, Biomedical Science and Clinical Research, and my particular favourite, the Journal of Surgery Care!

I expected one or two spammy invitations like this, but not so quickly: the preprint went live at about 07:00 and the first request was received less than two hours later. Even now they are coming in at a rate of two a day.

It’s fairly clear that preprint servers are now being automatically mined by journal marketing algorithms. Within hours of a manuscript appearing online, the title, keywords, and author details are harvested and fed into bulk invitation systems. Can legitimate preprint publishers like Research Square not do anything about it?

Each email requires power to get it from a server to my Inbox, so as well as being irritating it’s a waste of resources. Presumably this strategy by these predatory publishers occasionally works with naive authors, otherwise they wouldn’t bother doing it. I’m almost (almost!) tempted to respond to one of these invitations and see what happens. But life’s too short.

Preprints are meant to accelerate open science and transparent peer review. Ironically, the same openness also makes it trivial for automated systems to harvest new manuscripts and generate waves of journal solicitations. None of this detracts from the value of preprints—they are a powerful way to share research quickly and openly—but it’s a reminder that openness in science inevitably attracts a few opportunists as well.

Anyway, if you’re planning to submit a preprint, don’t say that you weren’t warned – you may discover that a remarkable number of journals are suddenly desperate to publish your “valuable manuscript”.