Constructing more informative plant-pollinator networks: visitation and pollen deposition networks in a heathland plant community.

ABSTRACT: Interaction networks are widely used as tools to understand plant-pollinator communities, and to examine potential threats to plant diversity and food security if the ecosystem service provided by pollinating animals declines. However, most networks to date are based on recording visits to flowers, rather than recording clearly defined effective pollination events. Here we provide the first networks that explicitly incorporate measures of pollinator effectiveness (PE) from pollen deposition on stigmas per visit, and pollinator importance (PI) as the product of PE and visit frequency. These more informative networks, here produced for a low diversity heathland habitat, reveal that plant-pollinator interactions are more specialized than shown in most previous studies. At the studied site, th

SUBMITTER: Ballantyne G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4571695 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature