Exotic flower visitors exploit large floral trait spaces resulting in asymmetric resource partitioning with native visitors

1.Exotic species often cause severe alterations in native communities due to their ability to rapidly and efficiently utilize a broad spectrum of resources. In flower-visitor interactions, the breadth of resource use by native and exotic animals as well as the partitioning of resources among them is often estimated based on the number of (shared) plant species used as resources. However, whether a flower visitor is able to exploit plant resources has been shown to be delimited by functional floral traits such as morphological barriers or attractive or repellent chemical cues. Each of the ecologically relevant traits can be viewed as a dimension of a Hutchinsonian n-dimensional hypervolume, which characterizes the range of phenotypes exploitable by a species.

2.In this study, we quantified the sizes and overlaps of n-dimensional hypervolumes defined by floral traits that are exploitable by native and exotic flower visitors (afterwards referred to as exploited space, ES). In the heavil...

1. 外来物种（exotic species）通常会对本地群落造成剧烈的改变，究其根源在于其能够快速且高效地利用广谱资源。在访花互作（flower-visitor interactions）中，研究者常基于被用作资源的（共享）植物物种数量，估算本土与外来动物的资源利用广度以及彼此间的资源分隔情况。然而已有研究证实，访花者能否利用植物资源，往往受限于功能性花部性状（functional floral traits），例如形态学屏障、吸引或驱避性化学信号等。每一项与生态相关的性状，均可被视为哈钦森n维超体积（Hutchinsonian n-dimensional hypervolume）的一个维度，该超体积用于表征某一物种可利用的表型范围。
2. 本研究中，我们量化了由本土与外来访花者可利用的花部性状所定义的n维超体积的大小与重叠度（该超体积后续称为可利用空间（exploited space, ES））。在重度……