Environmental stochasticity modulates trait matching, indirect effects, and resilience in adaptive mutualistic networks

Environmental stochasticity is ubiquitous, yet how its magnitude, temporal autocorrelation, and synchrony across species shape the stability and eco‐evolutionary trajectories of adaptive ecological networks remain poorly understood. Here, we develop an adaptive mutualistic network model to examine how different components of environmental stochasticity, together with ecologically mediated indirect effects, jointly shape network resilience and patterns of trait matching. Environmental stochasticity generally reduces network resilience while increasing both trait mismatch and trait heterogeneity. Indirect effects enhance resilience and promote tighter trait matching both among interacting species and between species and their environment by stabilising abundance dynamics and indirectly constraining selection pressures. These effects depend on network position: peripheral species experience stronger indirect effects, leading to tighter between‐species trait matching but weaker alignment with environmental optima, whereas core species experience weaker indirect effects, reduced interspecific trait matching, but stronger alignment between species traits and environmental optima. Increasing temporal autocorrelation and greater fluctuation amplitude further erode resilience and trait matching by amplifying persistent environmental mismatches and suppressing indirect stabilising pathways, whereas higher cross‐species synchrony buffers mutualistic networks by maintaining indirect effects. Together, our results demonstrate that environmental stochasticity reshapes eco‐evolutionary dynamics not only through direct environmental forcing, but also by modulating indirect interaction pathways embedded in network structure, highlighting the joint roles of indirect effects, topology and trait matching in determining the resilience of adaptive mutualistic networks.