Nearby rainforest promotes coffee pollination by increasing spatio-temporal stability in bee species richness

By Alexandra-Maria Klein. 2009

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Natural tropical forests are highly diverse and are known to contribute to forest-based services such as pollination of nearby crops. Landscape changes cause spatial and temporal bee community changes, but consequences how the community changes affect pollination is not well analyzed. This paper addresses the effects of rainforest distance and on site flower resources in agro-forests on spatial and temporal variation in pollinator communities and the consequences for coffee pollination. The study was conducted in 24 agro-forests dominated by coffee and cacao in Sulawesi, Indonesia differing in their distance to rainforest margin of the Lore-Lindu National Park and in flower density and its temporal variation. In all agro-forests, (1) transect surveys of the understory were obtained over a five-month period to assess bee community compositional similarity, bee diversity, and the temporal variation in bee diversity; and (2) coffee flower visitors were observed and open and bagged pollination treatments conducted over one week of coffee blooming to assess bee diversity and the spatial variation in bee diversity and coffee pollination. Mean number of shared species of the understory ranged between 40 and 60% per agro-forest and was higher in agro-forests nearby the rainforest than in agro-forests with a minimal distance of 500 m isolated from the rainforest. Mean species richness in the understory and in coffee flowers decreased with rainforest isolation and increased with flower resource availability. Temporal variation in bee species richness of the understory and spatial variation of the coffee flower-visiting bee species richness per agro-forest increased with forest distance. The variation in bee species richness decreased the mean and increased the spatial variation in bee-pollinated coffee fruit set per agro-forest. In conclusion, crops grown near intact rainforests and which profit from the pollination by many species may fluctuate less in bee-pollinated fruit set across crop plants than crop plants in isolated agriculture that receive low or even single species pollination services.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6dd6e4199015bc8762285d5a37c1f40b4032230f

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Citations in the corpus

Creating patches of native flowers facilitates crop pollination in large agricultural fields: mango as a case study (2012, background): “Both abundance and diversity of flower visitors are important to crop pollination efficiency (Kremen, Williams & Thorp 2002; Carvalheiro et al. 2010) and stability (Klein 2009; Winfree & Kremen 2009).”
Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance (2013, unknown): “Coffee highland (A) (48, 49) Klein, aklein@uni.”
Ecosystem services by birds and bees to coffee in a changing climate: A review of coffee berry borer control and pollination (2019, background): “…(e.g., Steffan-Dewenter and Tscharntke, 1999; Klein et al., 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Ricketts, 2004; Priess et al., 2007; Ricketts et al., 2008; Klein, 2009; Garibaldi et al., 2011; Munyuli, 2011; Hipólito et al., 2018) and bird diversity and pest control services (e.g., Perfecto et al., 2004;…”
Restoration of Nontarget Species: Bee Communities and Pollination Function in Riparian Forests (2011, background): “If restored sites indeed support bee communities, then these sites potentially serve as sources for pollinator species that provide pollination service to crops (Kremen et al. 2007) and are important for stabilizing this service in different ecosystems (Klein 2009).”
Bees in disturbed habitats use, but do not prefer, alien plants (2011, background): “However, in ome cases agricultural landscapes support more diverse and bundant bee communities than do the natural habitats they eplaced (Hoehn, Tscharntke, Tylianakis & Steffan-Dewenter 008; Klein 2009; Tylianakis, Klein & Tscharntke 2005; infree, Griswold & Kremen 2007).”
How well do we understand landscape effects on pollinators and pollination services (2012, background): “Studies indicate that the abundance and richness of native pollinators may increase significantly as the distance to natural environments decreases, which also affects agricultural production (Steffan-Dewenter & Tschanrtke 1999; Greenleaf & Kremen 2006, Klein 2009; Tscharntke et al. 2011).”
Stability of pollination services decreases with isolation from natural areas despite honey bee visits. (2011, background): “When seed or fruit crop production are pollen limited, however, lower spatial and temporal stability of flower-visitor richness or visitation rate with isolation may decrease both the mean and stability of fruit set (Klein 2009; Garibaldi et al. 2011).”