Abstract
Declines in pollinator diversity and abundance have been reported across different regions, with implications for the reproductive success of plant species. However, research has focused primarily on pairwise plant-pollinator interactions, largely overlooking community-level dynamics. Yet species do not interact in isolation, they are embedded within larger networks whose structure can affect pollinator functional roles and, ultimately, the pollination services they deliver to plants. Here, we present one of the first efforts linking pollinator visitation to plant reproduction from a community-wide perspective using a well-replicated dataset encompassing 16 well-resolved plant-pollinator networks and data on reproductive success for 19 plant species from Mediterranean shrub ecosystems. We find that models including information on simple visitation metrics alone are good in explaining the variability in reproductive success observed. However, insights into the mechanisms through which differences in pollinator diversity translate into changes in reproductive success require additional information on network structure, particularly that reflecting niche complementarity between pollinators. Specifically, we find a positive effect of increasing niche complementarity between pollinators on plant reproductive success.
Footnotes
-Adding extra justifications and explanations, including a description of plant mating systems and possible confounding factors. -Adding R2 measures, as a proxy of the predictive power, and reinforcing how the metrics used relate to specific ecological mechanisms. -Testing for autocorrelation in the data and showing that spatial autocorrelation values are low in our system. -Releasing the code and data to make the analysis fully reproducible. - Author affiliations updated
https://zenodo.org/account/settings/github/repository/ibartomeus/BeeFunData