Pollinator diversity and specialization in relation to flower diversity

By Jochen Fründ, K. Linsenmair, N. Blüthgen. 2010

228 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the face of global decline in biodiversity, the relationship between diversity and species interactions deserves particular attention. If pollinators are strongly dependent on floral diversity due to mutual specialization, declines in plant diversity, e.g. caused by land use intensification, may be associated with linked extinctions of pollinators. However, the general extent of pollinator specialization is still poorly known. To explore the dependence of local bee and hoverfly communities on flower diversity, we recorded flower supply and flower-visiting insects on 27 meadows with varying flower diversity in southern Germany and analyzed (a) whether the diversity of flower visitors is correlated with flower diversity, (b) whether the degree of dietary specialization of flower visitors changes with flower diversity and (c) whether flower preferences of individual flower visitor species are constant or variable between different communities. Flower-visitor interaction webs were compiled during a single day on each meadow. This approach prevents relating pollinator species to flowers they never encounter because of non-overlapping phenology or spatial segregation. (a) Flower diversity and flower visitor diversity were positively correlated. (b) Flower visitor assemblies were significantly specialized at a relatively high level, contrasting to the opinion that plant-pollinator webs are highly generalized, and providing a possible explanation for the positive diversity correlation. However, the level of specialization did not change significantly across the gradient of flower diversity, suggesting that pollinators are partitioned to a similar extent in each meadow. (c) In the analysis of ten common flower visitor species previously categorized as generalists, strong evidence was found for both, consistent preferences and preferences that differ between sites. These results indicate a flexibility in flower preferences and a dynamic resource partitioning among pollinators. Generally, our findings highlight the complexity of plant-pollinator interactions and confirm the importance of flower diversity for bee and hoverfly communities.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/160cddc02b5e57252c65b73dca23695a46f8824e

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Insect Science

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Citations in the corpus

How to be a specialist? Quantifying specialisation in pollination networks (2011, unknown): “…(Lunau, 2004), pollinators shift readily between plants when their abundance changes (e.g. Brown and Mitchell, 2001, Lopezaraiza-Mikel et al., 2007, Fründ et al., 2010), and most plant species have alternative, if usually less efficient, ways of sustaining a population (self-pollination and clonal…”
Opportunities to enhance pollinator biodiversity in solar parks (2021, background): “The neutral and negative impacts of floral abundance on pollinators [54,63,65,70–75] reported differential impacts depending on pollinator and flowering plant species, indicating species-specific preferences where pollinators can be selective with flower use and hence a diverse range of foraging res”
Pathways for the effects of increased nitrogen deposition on fauna (2017, background): “Specialisedmono- or oligolectic bee species are probably highly vulnerable from a decline in plant diversity (Biesmeijer et al., 2006; Fründ et al., 2010).”
Patterns of pollinator turnover and increasing diversity associated with urban habitats (2017, methodology): “As in Fründ et al. (2010), we compared H2’ values against those calculated from null model networks assuming random associations (while fixing row and column totals), thereby simulating completely opportunistic associations (Blüthgen et al. 2006).”
Functional flower traits and their diversity drive pollinator visitation (2017, background): “Previous studies found that plant species richness increases pollinator species richness and visitation frequency (Ebeling et al. 2008, Fründ et al. 2010).”