  Mutually beneficial interactions between plant and pollinators play an
essential role in the biodiversity, stability of the ecosystem and crop
production. Despite their immense importance, rapid decline events of
pollinators are common worldwide in past decades. Excessive use of chemical
pesticides is one of the most important threat to pollination in the current
era of anthropogenic changes. Pesticides are applied to the plants to increase
their growth by killing harmful pests and pollinators accumulates toxic
pesticides from the interacting plants directly from the nectar and pollen.
This has a significant adverse effect on the pollinator growth and the
mutualism which in turn can cause an abrupt collapse of the community however
predicting the fate of such community dynamics remains a blur under the
alarming rise in the dependency of chemical pesticides. We mathematically
modeled the influence of pesticides in a multispecies mutualistic community and
used 105 real plant-pollinator networks sampled worldwide as well as simulated
networks, to assess its detrimental effect on the plant-pollinator mutualistic
networks. Our results indicate that the persistence of the community is
strongly influenced by the level of pesticide and catastrophic and irreversible
community collapse may occur due to pesticide. Furthermore, a species rich,
highly nested community with low connectance and modularity has greater
potential to function under the influence of pesticide. We finally proposed a
realistic intervention strategy which involves the management of the pesticide
level of one targeted plant from the community. We show that our intervention
strategy can significantly delay the collapse of the community. Overall our
study can be considered as the first attempt to understand the consequences of
the chemical pesticide on a plant-pollinator mutualistic community.
