Much more than bees—Wildflower plantings support highly diverse flower-visitor communities from complex to structurally simple agricultural landscapes

By I. Grass, Jörg Albrecht, F. Jauker, T. Diekötter, D. Warzecha, V. Wolters, Nina Farwig. 2016

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract One goal of wildflower plantings is to promote biodiversity in intensively managed agricultural landscapes. Flower visitors of wildflower plantings encompass many ecologically and economically important species. However, most studies on flower visitors of wildflower plantings have focused on single or few prominent taxa (e.g., wild bees and hoverflies). In contrast, it remains largely unresolved how non-prominent flower visitors of the community are affected by wildflower resources, landscape context and time of the flowering season. We studied highly diverse flower-visitor communities on 14 wildflower plantings varying in flower abundance and richness and their surrounding landscape context within a 500 m radius (percentage arable land, presence of additional wildflower plantings). Flower visitors were sampled in the early (May–June) and late (June–July) flowering season and grouped as follows: managed honeybees, wild bees, hoverflies, all other flower visitors. Strikingly, only 81 (25.1%) of all 322 visiting species (

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b0deeb5105f1b8d6bc98445e5460a43d52674c9

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. S. Potts
2. John M. Holland
3. Dave Goulson
4. F. Jauker
5. T. Diekötter
6. V. Wolters
7. A. Armstrong
8. Hollie Blaydes

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. Dave Goulson
2. John M. Holland
3. S. Potts
4. V. Wolters
5. Rita Földesi
6. F. Jauker
7. T. Diekötter
8. I. Grass

In Plant Science

1. John M. Holland
2. S. Potts
3. Dave Goulson
4. A. Armstrong
5. Hollie Blaydes
6. V. Wolters
7. F. Jauker
8. T. Diekötter

Citations in the corpus

• Larger pollinators deposit more pollen on stigmas across multiple plant species—A meta‐analysis (2020, background): “Despite such species are often flower visitors (Grass et al., 2016) and verified pollinators (Rader et al., 2012, 2016), their importance in the pollination of a broad range of crops has largely been overlooked (Inouye et al., 2015; Larson et al., 2001; Woodcock et al., 2014).”
• Opportunities to enhance pollinator biodiversity in solar parks (2021, background): “There was limited evidence for honeybees, with two pieces of evidence reporting positive relationships between floral abundance and honeybee abundance [44,66].”
• Attractiveness of wildflower mixtures for wild bees and hoverflies depends on some key plant species (2018, background): “…responded contrary to the availability of key plant species in the mixtures, suggesting that plant species selection is still not optimal for flower visitors other than bees, although up to 75% of the flower-visiting species in flowering fields are neither bees nor hoverflies (Grass et al., 2016).”
• The best wildflowers for wild bees (2019, background): “In contrast the commercial wildflower mixes used in Germany, although containing multiple Fabaceae species, are overall more diverse than the typical pollinator mixes used in the UK (Grass et al. 2016; Warzecha et al. 2018).”