Data for: Fundamental interaction niches: towards a functional understanding of ecological networks’ resilience

Global change will create new species interactions and alter or eliminate
existing ones, a process known as interaction rewiring. This rewiring can
significantly affect how ecosystems function. To better predict the future
structure of ecological networks, it is crucial to assess their ability to
adapt to changes. Here, we introduce two concepts: ‘rewiring capacity’ of
a single species (the multidimensional trait space of all its potential
interaction partners within a region) and ‘rewiring potential’ of a local
community (the total trait space covered by interaction partners of the
species at the target trophic level locally). To quantify the rewiring
capacity and potential, we apply existing methods for determining
species' functional interaction niches in a novel way to quantify
species’ and communities’ ability to form new interactions and the
functional resilience of interaction networks to global change. To
illustrate the applicability of these concepts, we assessed the rewiring
capacity and potential of interactions between 1,002 flowering plant
species and 318 hummingbird species across the Americas. The rewiring
capacity and potential metrics offer a new way to understand and quantify
ecosystem resilience, allowing us to map how ecological networks respond
to global change.