Project Details
Projekt
Plant-pollinator interactions: the role of floral traits and pollen flux during forest recovery (SP3)
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 444827997
Most tropical flowering plant species rely on animal pollinators including insects, birds and bats, which are all attracted by valuable resources provided by flowers. Preserving crucial pollination services provided by animal pollinators in tropical ecosystems requires not only the protection of remaining forests, but also the restoration of disturbed forests and thus a clear understanding of the resistance and resilience processes underlying plant-pollinator interactions. Little is known on how pollinator communities and their interaction networks with plants recover along a forest recovery gradient, particularly for nocturnal pollinators like moths and canopy communities. In the first phase of the research unit, we started to fill this gap by exploring recovery trajectories and dynamics of pollinator communities and their interaction networks along our forest recovery gradient, focusing on bees as major group of diurnal visitors and moths as nocturnal visitors. Our results indicate a relatively high resistance and resilience of pollinator abundance and diversity in general and of their interaction networks in the study area. They also highlight the importance of flexible generalist pollinators in maintaining community and network resistance and resilience. These generalist mobile pollinators likely also ensure the transfer of pollen into regenerating habitats and may represent major drivers of forest system reassembly processes. However, their occurrence and efficiency as pollinators may strongly depend on the hitherto still hardly investigated interplay between abiotic conditions and the traits of co-occurring plants and pollinators as well as the overall density of floral resources. This will ultimately affect pollen flux, deposition and seed set. In phase two, SP3 will focus on how abiotic conditions and species traits affect pollinator attractiveness, visitation, and pollen transfer, particularly in T-REX planted tree species and pioneering plants. In four WPs, we will combine trapping, netting, DNA metabarcoding, and drone-based imaging to assess pollinator and floral traits, resource distribution, and microclimatic factors. Integrating this data with successional age will identify key drivers of floral trait variation and diversity and their implications for pollinator attraction, pollinator occurrence, pollination network structure and pollen flux - knowledge that is crucial to fully understand the role of pollinators in forest recovery.
DFG Programme
Research Units
International Connection
Ecuador
Cooperation Partner
Professor Boris Tinoco, Ph.D.
