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Visiting flowers and transporting pollen in fragmented landscapes
An international team of researchers compares wild bee networks on a local and landscape scale.
Traditionally, interactions between plants and their pollinators are analyzed based on visits to flowers. A research team led by the University of Göttingen - Germany, with the participation of researcher Carine Emer (Young Fluminense Researcher - FAPERJ) from the Research Institute of the Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro, studied wild bees in fragments of limestone fields. The researchers analyzed both the nets that show visits to flowers and the nets where pollen is carried on the bees' bodies. They found that bee visits to flowers were not always associated with pollen collection. The pollen data also clearly showed that the number of interactions increased with greater landscape diversity. These findings show that the degree of specialization of pollination networks is generally underestimated when pollen transport is not considered in studies. The results were published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B., one of the world's most important journals in the field of Biology, Ecology and Conservation.
Understanding the organization of networks between plants and their pollinators is vital to support nature conservation when planning multifunctional and sustainable landscapes. However, little is known about how the networks between pollen and bees are influenced by changes at the landscape level. Combining data from 29 fragments of limestone grasslands, which are among the most species-rich habitats in Central Europe, showed that only 37 percent of interactions between plant species and wild bees occurred in both pollen transport and flower visitation networks. 28 percent of interactions could only be detected in pollen transport networks and 35 percent only in flower visitation networks. When all the local networks are analyzed together, the pollen transport data show that the proportion of unique interactions for each limestone field fragment increased with landscape diversity.
"Our results show that the specialization of plant-pollinator networks decreases in diverse landscapes. If only information on flower visits is analyzed, this does not provide a complete picture and underestimates plant-pollinator specialization,” explains Dr. Felipe Librán-Embid, who carried out the research as part of his PhD in Agroecology at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences in Göttingen. “Data on pollen transport and also the analysis of meta-networks - taking into account different networks - are key to understanding and managing pollinators and the plants they visit in cultivated landscapes,” adds Professor Teja Tscharntke from the University of Göttingen, who supervised the work together with Professor Ingo Grass from the University of Hohenheim. Carine Emer adds: “This study expands our knowledge of how ecological interactions, which are the basis of nature's organization, are structured at different levels of biological organization - understanding this complexity is fundamental to thinking about transformative solutions that maximize the provision of ecosystem services that are essential for human and environmental health.”