Unveiling the Patterns of Wild Bee‐Plant Interactions on a Large and Mostly Unexplored Mediterranean Island (Sardinia, Italy)

ABSTRACT Plant–pollinator networks provide crucial insights into the mechanisms shaping the structure, stability, and ecosystem services of bee communities. Despite the Mediterranean basin being one of the world's richest regions for bee and plant diversity, it remains relatively understudied, with many islands largely overlooked in interaction studies. Here, we conducted an extensive survey of wild bees and their interactions with plants across four sites in Sardinia, the second–largest Mediterranean island, including two locations on Asinara Island with largely natural habitats and two sites in Nurra, a mainland area dominated by agroecosystems. In total, we recorded 122 wild bee species, including Hoplitis corsaria (Warncke, 1991), here reported for the first time from Italy, and six additional species newly recorded for Sardinia, highlighting the still incomplete exploration of the island's bee fauna. Bee diversity varied across sites, with higher richness at greater habitat heterogeneity, and at temporal scale, with consistent peaks of richness and diversity in May–July, likely according to variation in plant species richness but not in plant abundance. All bee–plant networks (divided by site and seasonal period) were highly specialized, modular, and non–nested, indicating low stability and potential vulnerability to disturbances. Network–level specialization, but not species–level specialization, varied among sites and also peaked in May–July, while marginally decreasing with plant species richness in the whole community. Since habitat heterogeneity was positively associated with percentage of both crop and urban cover, the observed patterns preliminarily suggested a role of anthropogenic disturbance on bee communities but not, or weakly, on network topology. Broader sampling across Sardinia will refine our understanding of habitat–driven effects.