How exotic plants integrate into pollination networks.

ABSTRACT:

Summary

There is increasing world-wide concern about the impact of the introduction of exotic species on ecological communities. Since many exotic plants depend on native pollinators to successfully establish, it is of paramount importance that we understand precisely how exotic species integrate into existing plant-pollinator communities. In this manuscript, we have studied a global data base of empirical pollination networks to determine whether community, network, species or interaction characteristics can help identify invaded communities. We found that a limited number of community and network properties showed significant differences across the empirical data sets - namely networks with exotic plants present are characterized by greater total, plant and pollinator richness, a

SUBMITTER: Stouffer DB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4277853 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature