Disrupted Gene Flow and Genomic Erosion: Molecular and Landscape Perspectives on Pollinator Adaptive Potential in Fragmented Ecosystems

Rapid industrialization, agricultural intensification, and climate extremes are fragmenting ecosystems at unprecedented scales, isolating pollinator populations critical to global food security. Such fragmentation reduces effective population size, disrupts gene flow, and accelerates genetic drift, driving genomic erosion, loss of allelic richness, and heightened vulnerability to environmental change. Our synthesis integrates landscape ecology with cutting-edge molecular and genomic approaches to elucidate the mechanistic interplay between structural and functional connectivity and pollinator adaptive capacity in fragmented habitats. We demonstrate that strategically designed ecological corridors and stepping-stone networks can attenuate extinction vortices by restoring metapopulation gene flow, buffering against stochastic demographic collapse, and safeguarding long-term evolutionary potential. Advancing pollinator conservation necessitates an urgent paradigm shift toward integrative strategies that unite habitat restoration, molecular diagnostics, and evolutionary-informed management, leveraging high-resolution genomic surveillance and landscape-level connectivity modelling to pre-empt biodiversity collapse and fortify ecosystem resilience in the Anthropocene.