Functional group diversity of bee pollinators increases crop yield

By P. Hoehn, T. Tscharntke, J. Tylianakis, I. Steffan‐Dewenter. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences, 2008

756 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Niche complementarity is a commonly invoked mechanism underlying the positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, but little empirical evidence exists for complementarity among pollinator species. This study related differences in three functional traits of pollinating bees (flower height preference, daily time of flower visitation and within-flower behaviour) to the seed set of the obligate cross-pollinated pumpkin Cucurbita moschata Duch. ex Poir. across a land-use intensity gradient from tropical rainforest and agroforests to grassland in Indonesia. Bee richness and abundance changed with habitat variables and we used this natural variation to test whether complementary resource use by the diverse pollinator community enhanced final yield. We found that pollinator diversity, but not abundance, was positively related to seed set of pumpkins. Bees showed species-specific spatial and temporal variation in flower visitation traits and within-flower behaviour, allowing for classification into functional guilds. Diversity of functional groups explained even more of the variance in seed set (r2=45%) than did species richness (r2=32%) highlighting the role of functional complementarity. Even though we do not provide experimental, but rather correlative evidence, we can link spatial and temporal complementarity in highly diverse pollinator communities to pollination success in the field, leading to enhanced crop yield without any managed honeybees.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cfcdc359a3904329189a55fa97f729d136582372

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Citations in the corpus

Natural land cover drives pollinator abundance and richness, leading to reductions in pollen limitation in cotton agroecosystems (2016, background): “Mechanistically, greater fruit set observed in more diverse pollinator communities is attributable to greater pollination functional diversity across both space and time (e.g., Hoehn et al., 2008; Garibaldi et al., 2013).”
Weeds for bees? A review (2015, background): “Diverse pollinator communities have been found to improve pollination services more than poorer communities (Klein et al. 2003; Hoehn et al. 2008; Klein et al. 2012).”
Conserving Southeast Asian forest biodiversity in human-modified landscapes (2010, background): “, 2003) and pumpkin (Hoehn et al., 2008) depend on a high diversity of bee species, which is only available in heteroge-”
Pollination reservoirs for wild bee habitat enhancement in cropping systems: a review (2017, background): “Other synergies include bee species-specific weather restrictions (Boyle-Makowski 1987) and decreased temporal and spatial variation in pollinator abundances (Hoehn et al. 2008; Kremen, Williams, and Thorp 2002), but see Pisanty, Klein, and Mandelik (2014).”
Human perturbations reduce dung beetle diversity and dung removal ecosystem function (2021, background): “This effect may arise from both the complementarity in the functionality of the species present in an assemblage (Hoehn et al., 2008), and the positive effects of the interactions between species (Cardinale et al., 2007), that would enhance ecosystem service provision through a wider variety of…”
Contrasting patterns in species and functional-trait diversity of bees in an agricultural landscape (2015, background): “Retention of functional diversity in bee communities is important because species with different traits can provide complementary pollination services (Hoehn et al. 2008; Albrecht et al. 2012) and are likely to vary in sensitivity to different disturbances, making service provision more stable at th”
Stability of pollination services decreases with isolation from natural areas despite honey bee visits. (2011, background): “…proposed to explain why richer pollinator communities might have enhanced function or stability, including species response diversity, functional redundancy, functional complementarity and sampling effects (Tscharntke et al. 2005; Hoehn et al. 2008; Winfree & Kremen 2009; Blüthgen and Klein 2011).”
Local habitat characteristics but not landscape urbanization drive pollinator visitation and native plant pollination in forest remnants (2013, methodology): “We ran separate analyses with each variable, but the two sets of results should not be interpreted as fully independent (Hoehn et al., 2008).”
Impacts of coffee agroforestry management on tropical bee communities. (2010, background): “, 2007; Vergara and Badano, 2009; Winfree and Kremen, 2009), a pattern explained by the greater niche complementarity between bee functional groups within diverse communities (Fenster et al., 2004; Hoehn et al., 2008).”
Pollination efficiency of wild bees and hoverflies provided to oilseed rape (2012, background): “…of pollinator diversity (i.e. both pollinator taxa in one treatment) on crop yield was not explicitly tested, although the immediate benefits of multiple pollinator taxa to crop yield have been demonstrated in other recent studies (Klein et al., 2003; Hoehn et al., 2008; Winfree & Kremen, 2009).”
Pollinator-friendly management does not increase the diversity of farmland bees and wasps (2015, background): “Recent work has also highlighted the importance of a diverse pollinator community for providing a high quality pollination service (Westerkamp and Gottsberger, 2000; Klein et al., 2003; Hoehn et al., 2008; Garibaldi et al., 2013).”