Journal Article

Bee diversity effects on pollination depend on functional complementarity and niche shifts

Holzschuh, Andrea, Fründ, Jochen, Tscharntke, Teja, Dormann, Carsten F.

2013

Overview

Biodiversity is important for many ecosystem processes. Global declines in pollinator diversity and abundance have been recognized, raising concerns about a pollination crisis of crops and wild plants. However, experimental evidence for effects of pollinator species diversity on plant reproduction is extremely scarce. We established communities with 1-5 bee species to test how seed production of a plant community is determined by bee diversity. Higher bee diversity resulted in higher seed production, but the strongest difference was observed for one compared to more than one bee species. Functional complementarity among bee species had a far higher explanatory power than bee diversity, suggesting that additional bee species only benefit pollination when they increase coverage of functional niches. In our experiment, complementarity was driven by differences in flower and temperature preferences. Interspecific interactions among bee species contributed to realized functional complementarity, as bees reduced interspecific overlap by shifting to alternative flowers in the presence of other species. This increased the number of plant species visited by a bee community and demonstrates a new mechanism for a biodiversity-function relationship (\"interactive complementarity\"). In conclusion, our results highlight both the importance of bee functional diversity for the reproduction of plant communities and the need to identify complementarity traits for accurately predicting pollination services by different bee communities.

• Publisher: Ecological Society of America,ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
• Subject: Abundance / Animal and plant ecology / Animal, plant and microbial ecology / Animals / Apoidea / Autoecology / Bees / Bees - classification / Bees - physiology / Biodiversity / biodiversity-ecosystem functioning / Biological and medical sciences / Bumblebees / Community ecology / complementarity effect / crops / Ecosystem / Ecosystem studies / ecosystems / Flowers / functional diversity / Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology / General aspects / Insect communities / Insect pollination / interspecific competition / niche plasticity / Niches / Plant communities / plant pollinator network / Plant reproduction / Plant species / plant-animal interactions / Plants / Plants - classification / Plants and fungi / Pollinating insects / Pollination / Pollination - physiology / Pollinators / prediction / specialization / Species / Species diversity / Synecology / Temperature / wild plants