Plant–flower visitor interaction webs: Temporal stability and pollinator specialization increases along an experimental plant diversity gradient

By A. Ebeling, Alexandra-Maria Klein, T. Tscharntke. 2011

91 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Although most plants benefit from pollen vectors, very little information exists about how plant diversity structures the interactions between plants and their flower visitors. The structure of such interaction webs holds information about specialization and effectiveness of flower visitors in flower resource use. Here, we analyzed 52 plant–flower visitor interaction webs along a gradient of experimentally manipulated plant species richness in a European grassland. The gradient allows testing for effects of the number of flowering plant species per se. Linkage density and interaction diversity between flowering plant species and their visiting insect species increased with higher richness of flowering species. Increased interaction diversity led to smaller temporal variability in the frequency of flower visits. These results suggest higher temporal stability of pollination provided for plants integrated in complex interaction webs with a high number of flowering plant species. Flower resource specialization of solitary bees, but not of honey and bumble bees, increased with increasing flowering plant species richness. Conservation of diverse grasslands can result in high flower specialization and may promote effectiveness of pollination services.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/297d4d1d03ccc431d09aafb738582b8f842ba09e

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Citations in the corpus

Flower-strip agri-environment schemes provide diverse and valuable summer flower resources for pollinating insects (2018, background): “The observed visitor diversity, more than 110 insect morphotypes, was within the top range of other observations in European farmland flowered areas as 34 to 131 pollinator species in Germany (Fründ et al. 2010; Ebeling et al. 2011) and 25 in England (Campbell et al.”
Herbivore and pollinator responses to grassland management intensity along experimental changes in plant species richness (2012, background): “Many pollinator species, especially solitary bees, can visit a broad spectrum of flowering plant species, but in fact, prefer a lower number of species, explaining why pollinator richness increases with increasing numbers of flowering plant species (Steffan Dewenter and Tscharntke, 2001; Ebeling et ”
Pollination reservoirs for wild bee habitat enhancement in cropping systems: a review (2017, methodology): “Quantitative visitation webs are one illuminating method for illustrating plant–pollinator interaction webs (Ebeling, Klein, and Tscharntke 2011; Memmott 1999).”