Plant-Pollinator Interactions in the Anthropocene: Why We Need a Systems Approach

Abstract

Animal-mediated pollination is one of the most ecologically and economically important mutualisms and serves as a remarkable example of cross-kingdom communication and coevolution. Unfortunately, pollinators, plants, and the interactions between them are threatened in the Anthropocene. While pollination emerges from interactions across biological scales, existing research and expertise have developed in distinct silos reflecting traditional fields of study such as ecology, plant physiology, neuroethology, etc. This forward-looking review and perspective is a culmination of the "Plant-pollinator interactions in the Anthropocene" symposium at the 2025 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, which collected expertise across these disciplinary silos to identify pressing questions our community needs to tackle in the next decade. In this perspective piece, we argue that an integrative, organismally informed systems approach is critical to unraveling the complexity of how plant-pollinator relationships are impacted by dynamic anthropogenic stressors. Specifically, this calls for an intentional and iterative integration of holistic modeling studies with empirical studies. Modeling the emergent properties driven by organismal interactions in pollination systems can identify impactful variables; this in turn should drive design of empirical studies that elucidate how organisms respond to changing environments in the context of those impactful variables, feeding back into improved models. Repetition of this process will allow better predictive power over pollination stability in changing landscapes. Finally, we consider both existing barriers to this integration, as well as emerging opportunities (such as new technologies) that can help bridge across traditional fields.