Spatial prioritization for conserving hummingbird–plant interaction roles across Mexico

Abstract

Global biodiversity goals acknowledge that conserving species alone is insufficient to maintain ecosystem functioning. Yet, spatial conservation planning rarely incorporates ecological interactions, limiting efforts to protect both species' persistence and the ecological processes they support. This challenge is particularly relevant for animal-mediated mutualisms, where species differ in their ecological importance according to their roles within interaction networks. We present a network-informed framework that incorporates these interaction roles into spatial conservation planning using network centrality metrics. Interaction networks were constructed by combining documented hummingbird–plant interactions with species co-occurrence predicted from ecological niche models and used to derive network-based conservation weights for spatial prioritization. We illustrate its application using hummingbird–plant pollination networks across Mexico. Our results demonstrate that mountain systems emerged as key functional cores for conserving species with important interaction roles, yet most remain outside the current Protected Area network. Interaction-based prioritization identified important conservation areas that were not detected by conventional bird-only approaches. Specifically, we found that protecting high-centrality hummingbirds and plant hubs increased their representativeness by up to 15%, improving the coverage of both specialist and generalist species and enhancing the conservation of network structure. This framework provides a transferable approach for incorporating ecological interactions into conservation planning. By explicitly considering species roles within ecological networks, it helps identify areas that contribute simultaneously to species persistence and the maintenance of ecological processes. Integrating network-informed priorities into conservation strategies can strengthen ecosystem functions, thereby contributing to the implementation of the goals of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.