Document Type
Honors Thesis
Abstract
Plant-pollinator mutualisms require temporal overlap between flowering and pollinator activity, so climate-driven timing shifts can weaken the interaction and, in severe cases, destabilize the system. This work investigates how reduced overlap affects persistence in an obligate plant-pollinator pair using a coupled differential equation model in which a phenological overlap factor scales the saturating mutualistic benefit. Simplification with a constant overlap enables closed-form equilibrium and stability analysis, revealing that below a critical overlap threshold, coexistence is no longer maintained. Rescaling reduces the parameter space from ten quantities to seven dimensionless groups, and sensitivity analysis identifies the degree of species dependence and benefit efficiency as the strongest drivers of this threshold. Application of Peponapis pruinosa phenology data places the current overlap at just 26% above the collapse boundary, quantifying the system’s fragility under continued mismatch.
Disciplines
Dynamic Systems | Non-linear Dynamics | Numerical Analysis and Computation | Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics
Publication Date
Spring 5-4-2026
Language
English
Faculty Mentor of Honors Project
Hristo V. Kojouharov
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Carlson, Austin J., "Phenological Overlap in Obligate Plant-Pollinator Mutualism" (2026). 2026 Spring Honors Capstones Projects. 4.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/honors_spring2026/4
Included in
Dynamic Systems Commons, Non-linear Dynamics Commons, Numerical Analysis and Computation Commons, Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics Commons