Predictability of bee community composition after floral removals differs by floral trait group.

ABSTRACT: Plant-bee visitor communities are complex networks. While studies show that deleting nodes alters network topology, predicting these changes in the field remains difficult. Here, a simple trait-based approach is tested for predicting bee community composition following disturbance. I selected six fields with mixed cover of flower species with shallow (open) and deep (tube) nectar access, and removed all flowers or flower heads of species of each trait in different plots paired with controls, then observed bee foraging and composition. I compared the bee community in each manipulated plot with bees on the same flower species in control plots. The bee morphospecies composition in manipulations with only tube flowers remaining was the same as that in the control plots, while the bee morphospe

SUBMITTER: Urban-Mead KR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5719381 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature