Urban fragmentation leads to lower floral diversity, with knock-on impacts on bee biodiversity.

ABSTRACT: Bees and flowering plants are two closely interacting groups of organisms. Habitat loss and fragmentation associated with urbanisation are major threats to both partners. Yet how and why bee and floral richness and diversity co-vary within the urban landscape remain unclear. Here, we sampled bees and flowering plants in urban green spaces to investigate how bee and flowering plant species richness, their phylogenetic diversity and pollination-relevant functional trait diversity influence each other in response to urban fragmentation. As expected, bee abundance and richness were positively related to flowering plant richness, with bee body size (but not bee richness and diversity) increasing with nectar-holder depth of flowering plants. Causal modelling indicated that bottom-up effects dict

SUBMITTER: Theodorou P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7730174 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature