How does plant richness affect pollinator richness and temporal stability of flower visits

By A. Ebeling, Alexandra-Maria Klein, J. Schumacher, W. Weisser, T. Tscharntke. 2008

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pollinators play a key role in the reproduction of most plant species, and pollinator and plant diversity are often related. We studied an experimental gradient of plant species richness for a better understanding of plantpollinator community interactions and their temporal variability, because in non-experimental field surveys plant richness is often confounded with gradients in management, soil fertility, and community composition. We observed pollinator species richness and frequency of visits six times in 73 plots over two years, and used advanced statistical analysis to account for the high number of zeroes that often occur in count data of rare species. The frequency of pollinator visits increased linearly with both the blossom cover and the number of flowering plant species, which was closely related to the total number of plant species, whereas the number of pollinator species followed a saturation curve. The presence of particularly attractive plant species was only important for the frequency of flower visits, but not to the richness of pollinators. Plant species richness, blossom cover, and the presence of attractive plant species enhanced the temporal stability in the frequency of pollinator visits. In conclusion, grasslands with high plant diversity enhance and stabilize frequent and diverse flower visitations, which should sustain effective pollination and plant reproduction.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05aec50dfa3821926749cdc7d5439f3833d0b461

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Evolution of plant materials for ecological restoration: insights from the applied and basic literature (2017, background): “Pollinator species diversity and the stability of pollination services can be enhanced by interplanting diverse species mixes in large-scale field conditions (Ebeling et al. 2008).”
Pollinator Diversity: Distribution, Ecological Function, and Conservation (2017, result): “In contrast, Ebeling et al. (2008) studied this relationship in rather larger (20 × 20 m) grassland plots in Germany.”
Creating patches of native flowers facilitates crop pollination in large agricultural fields: mango as a case study (2012, background): “…beneficial effect of plant diversity might arise because a diversity of food resources is important for flower visitor health (Müller & Kuhlmann 2008; Alaux et al. 2010), and can also improve stability of pollinator assemblages (Ebeling et al. 2008), enabling adaptation to environmental changes.”
Enhancing floral resources for pollinators in productive agricultural grasslands (2014, background): “As plateauing relationships between plant species richness and the diversity of pollinators have been reported elsewhere (Ebeling et al., 2008), the modest increases in floral diversity achieved in this study may represent a more cost effective approach to supporting pollinators than more diverse…”
Herbivore and pollinator responses to grassland management intensity along experimental changes in plant species richness (2012, methodology): “high blossom cover is a better predictor for pollinators than plant species richness alone supports similar results by Ebeling et al. (2008) and Holzschuh et al.”
Functional flower traits and their diversity drive pollinator visitation (2017, methodology): “In contrast to Ebeling et al. (2008), this required removing plots where no flowers occurred from the data.”
Low S‐allele numbers limit mate availability, reduce seed set and skew fitness in small populations of a self‐incompatible plant (2010, background): “…populations can result from a number of factors including Allee effects (Groom 1998), reduced habitat quality or quantity (Lennartsson 2002; Aizen & Feinsinger 2003), greater spatial isolation and increased edge effects (Kearns et al. 1998), and lower plant species diversity (Ebeling et al. 2008).”