Genetic diversity as a surrogate for the provision of ecosystem services

• Applicant: Panagiotis Theodorou, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Evolution, Anthropology
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 449821519

Biodiversity, defined as the variety of all forms of life across all levels of biological organisation, is the foundation of life on Earth. In addition to its intrinsic value, biodiversity is crucial for the functioning of ecosystems and for the life-supporting services for humanity. The majority of studies addressing biodiversity - ecosystem function relationships are generally focused on one facet of biological organization, that of species diversity. More recently, however, biodiversity - ecosystem function research had broadened its characterization of diversity to incorporate phenotypic and genotypic variation within and among populations of single species (i.e. intraspecific variation). Results of such studies have shown that intraspecific variation may influence community structure and ecosystem function as much as variation among species. Although this growing paradigm of studying the relationship between intraspecific variation and the functioning of communities has been studied with respect to primary productivity and stability, it has rarely been explored at other trophic levels or in ecological interactions, including pollination. Pollination is a major ecosystem service, in which insects play an important role for most angiosperm reproduction, including crops. However, the relationship between flower visitor diversity and pollination service provision shows little consensus across studies. Here, I aim to test the hypothesis that genetic diversity of pollinators provides a more refined and accurate measure of pollination service provision than species diversity of flower visitors. I will take advantage of an extensive dataset that I produced by collecting data from 18 sites across varying landscapes (rural and urban) in Germany. This dataset contains information on insect pollinator species richness along with pollination provision data of experimental potted plants and biological material of three major flower visitors (B. terrestris, B. lapidarius and B. pascuorum). In this proposal I propose to genotype SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism) in these three major pollinators and analyse the relationship between the diversity of pollinators, measured as genetic diversity and species richness and the ecosystem service of pollination. Mapping population genetic diversity to community species diversity, and their joint relationship to ecosystem service provision, which I propose here, would contribute significantly to the conceptual unification of biodiversity research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants