Diverse and high functioning communities of organisms are essential to life on earth, and specifically, to the maintenance of important ecosystem services such as pollination. Despite the importance of species interactions within a community, however, it is often not well understood how communities are assembled in the first place or why some species are generalists while others are specialists in their interaction preferences. My dissertation will explore the roles that community structure and population dynamics play in the assembly and persistence of mutualistic networks. Using a blend of computational simulations and empirical field work, I will try to see if there are detectable tradeoffs between network stability and network structure/function.