Gillespie, M.A.K., Baude, M., Biesmeijer, J. et al. (15 more authors) (2024) Flowering plant communities mediate the effects of habitat composition and configuration on wild pollinator communities. Functional Ecology. ISSN 0269-8463
Abstract
1. There is strong evidence that landscape-scale factors such as habitat diversity, composition and configuration are important drivers of declines in pollinators and pollination services. However, context and species-specific responses make it challenging to draw general conclusions about the most important components of landscapes that support diverse and abundant pollinator communities. 2. In this study, we took a functional-traits approach to community assembly and tested the hypothesis that landscape properties act most strongly on pollinators indirectly, through their influence on flowering plant communities. Using plant and pollinator data from 96 landscapes in Britain, we tested the associations between plant and pollinator communities and local environmental factors, such as habitat cover and configuration, using path analysis based on Mantel and partial Mantel statistics. 3. When all pollinators were considered, we found that the environmental factors had stronger links to the composition of flowering plant communities than to the composition of pollinator communities. Further, the flowering plant community was strongly linked to the pollinator community suggesting a mediating role between land use and pollinators. When separating the pollinator community into taxonomic groups, we found the same result for hoverflies, but wild bees were linked to both environmental factors and flowering plants. 4. We further explored these links with structural equation models using the response-effect trait framework as a guiding principle. We found strong evidence that land-use composition and configuration influence the trait distribution and functional diversity of the pollinator community via plant community composition. 5. These findings suggest that the indirect effect of land use on pollinators via flowering plants should be considered in informing the design of pollinator friendly landscapes and in future research of the effects of land use and management on wild pollinators.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Functional Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. |
Keywords: | community ordination, environmental filtering, floral resources, functional diversity, landscape ecology, pollinator community composition, traits |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 27 Sep 2024 11:07 |
Last Modified: | 17 Oct 2024 16:06 |
Published Version: | https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/fu... |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/1365-2435.14666 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:217667 |