When temperature calls the shots: Pollinators' floral choices in a warming world

While biotic factors such as traits, abundance or community context have long been recognized as the main determinants of species interactions, abiotic conditions such as temperature can rewire these interactions even when species composition and abundance remain constant. Interaction establishment in plant-pollinator systems is particularly sensitive to these conditions, as pollinator metabolism, cognition and behaviour and floral reward production all respond strongly to thermal variation. Yet empirical evidence for community-wide consequences of such temperature-driven shifts in interactions remains limited. Arrowsmith et al. (2025) demonstrate that changes in temperature, independently of species turnover, can trigger pollinators' flexibility in floral resource use, reshaping which flowers they visit in natural diverse communities. These findings suggest that, alongside trait matching, abundance, phylogeny or spatiotemporal overlap, temperature plays a substantial and previously underappreciated role in shaping plant-pollinator interaction patterns. These thermal effects have particularly important implications at a broader scale as climate change accelerates, as temperature-driven interaction rewiring can cascade through interaction networks, influencing their emerging properties and functional outcomes. This study therefore underscores the need to incorporate the abiotic context into predictive models of these networks for anticipating how climate change may destabilize-or stabilize-ecological systems.