Data from: Species-habitat networks reveal conservation implications that other community analyses do not detect

Grassland restoration is an important conservation intervention supporting declining insect pollinators in threatened calcareous grassland landscapes. While the success of restoration is often quantified using simple measures of diversity or similarity to a target communities, these measures do not capture fundamental aspect of community reconstruction. Here, we develop species-habitat networks that aim to define habitat level foraging dependencies of pollinators across restored grassland landscapes and compare their value to these more conventional measures of community restoration. We assessed this across Salisbury Plain (UK) which represents the largest area of chalk grassland in N.W. Europe, encompassing six distinct management types aimed at restoration and maintenance of species-rich calcareous grassland. Sites that were previously disturbed or reverting from arable agriculture were comparable in their pollinator abundance and species richness to those of ancient grasslands, although intensively managed grasslands supported low pollinator diversity. Applying our species-habitat network approach we found that pollinator communities in grasslands recovering from past military disturbance showed stronger modular associations with those in ancient grasslands compared to areas recovering from intensive agriculture. This highlights the importance of habitat history in shaping restoration trajectories. We propose that species-habitat networks should be part of the standard analytical toolkit assessing the effectiveness of restoration at landscape scale, particularly for mobile species such as insects.