Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 282, Issue 1814, Pages 14-22Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1130
Keywords
pollination; network; species interaction; pollinator effectiveness; pollinator importance; specialization
Categories
Funding
- Natural Environmental Research Council [NE/K004522/1]
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/K004522/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [NE/K004522/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Interaction networks are widely used as tools to understand plant pollinator communities, and to examine potential threats to plant diversity and food security if the ecosystem service provided by pollinating animals declines. However, most networks to date are based on recording visits to flowers, rather than recording dearly defined effective pollination events. Here we provide the first networks that explicitly incorporate measures of pollinator effectiveness (PE) from pollen deposition on stigmas per visit, and pollinator importance (PI) as the product of PE and visit frequency. These more informative networks, here produced for a low diversity heathland habitat, reveal that plant pollinator interactions are more specialized than shown in most previous studies. At the studied site, the spedalization index H-2' was lower for the visitation network than the PE network, which was in turn lower than H-2' for the PI network Our study shows that collecting PE data is feasible for community-level studies in low diversity communities and that including information about PE can change the structure of interaction networks. This could have important consequences for our understanding of threats to pollination systems.
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