Stella Watts

TL;DR: Ordination of flowers in a multivariate 'phenotype space' defined by the pollination syndromes showed that almost no plant species fall within the discrete syndrome clusters and the most common pollinator could not be successfully predicted.

TL;DR: It is shown that in contrast to expectation, biotic specialization of mutualistic networks is significantly lower at tropical than at temperate latitudes, which suggests higher tolerance against extinctions in tropical than in temperate communities.

TL;DR: The different meanings of generalist flowers with respect to the ecological "set and setting" of pollination are assessed, and notions of ecological, functional and phenotypic generalization are discussed.

TL;DR: The results suggest that both ecological and evolutionary processes at Quaternary time scales can be important in driving large-scale geographical patterns of contemporary biotic specialization, at least for co-evolved systems such as plant-hummingbird networks.

TL;DR: Higher levels of specialization and modularity were associated with species-rich communities and communities in which closely related hummingbirds visited distinct sets of flowering species, indicating a tighter co-evolutionary association between hummingbirds and their plants than in previously studied plant–bird mutualistic systems.