Summary1. Plant-pollinator interactions are affected by global change, with largely negative impacts on pollination and plant reproduction. Urban areas provide a unique and productive study system for understanding the impacts of many global change drivers on plant-pollinator interactions. 2. We review the mechanistic pathways through which urban drivers alter plant-pollinator interactions. The literature on urban drivers of plant-pollinator interactions is small but growing and has already produced exciting insights about how population processes or pollinator behaviour interacts with landscape urban drivers to affect pollination outcomes. 3. Habitat loss and fragmentation can change flower visitation rates and pollination success through changes in pollinator foraging behaviour or through population-level effects on pollinators. Urban environments, where impermeable surface provides an inhospitable matrix, may allow researchers to identify habitat fragments more clearly than in many other environments. 4. Recent studies have found that non-native plants are not differently preferred by pollinators relative to native plants, therefore removing the basis for expecting pollinator-mediated competition between native and non-native plants in urban habitats. However, non-native species together with managed vegetation may have powerful effects in urban habitats via changes in community-level plant phenology and consequent changes in pollinator phenology. 5. The current level of climate warming has not caused plants and pollinators to become detectably temporally separated, although at the same time, diversity among species' phenological responses could buffer plant-pollinator interactions from climate variation. Due to the urban warming effect, cities provide a promising system for better understanding the warming effects on plant-pollinator interactions. 6. Environmental contaminants such as soil nitrogen and heavy metal pollution have been examined with respect to plant-pollinator interactions in small-scale, mechanistic studies. The extent to which environmental contaminants drive plant-pollinator interactions in actual urban landscapes is, however, currently unknown. 7. Important knowledge gaps that require research attention include understanding the consequences of plant and pollinator trait filtering on plant-pollinator interactions, and expanding the literature to include underrepresented biomes and pollinator taxa.
Anthropogenic landscapes are associated with biodiversity loss and large shifts in species composition and traits. These changes predict the identities of winners and losers of future global change, and also reveal which environmental variables drive a taxon's response to land use change. We explored how the biodiversity of native bee species changes across forested, agricultural, and urban landscapes. We collected bee community data from 36 sites across a 75,000 km 2 region, and analyzed bee abundance, species richness, composition, and life-history traits. Season-long bee abundance and richness were not detectably different between natural and anthropogenic landscapes, but community phenologies differed strongly, with an early spring peak followed by decline in forests, and a more extended summer sea-
The response and effect trait framework, if supported empirically, would provide for powerful and general predictions about how biodiversity loss leads to loss in ecosystem function. This framework proposes that species traits will explain how different species respond to disturbance (i.e. response traits) as well as their contribution to ecosystem function (i.e. effect traits). However, predictive response and effect traits remain elusive for most systems. Here, we use data on crop pollination services provided by native, wild bees to explore the role of six commonly used species traits in determining both species’ response to land‐use change and the subsequent effect on crop pollination. Analyses were conducted in parallel for three crop systems (watermelon, cranberry, and blueberry) located within the same geographical region (mid‐Atlantic USA). Bee species traits did not strongly predict species’ response to land‐use change, and the few traits that were weakly predictive were not consistent across crops. Similarly, no trait predicted species’ overall functional contribution in any of the three crop systems, although body size was a good predictor of per capita efficiency in two systems. Overall we were unable to make generalizable predictions regarding species responses to land‐use change and its effect on the delivery of crop pollination services. Pollinator traits may be useful for understanding ecological processes in some systems, but thus far the promise of traits‐based ecology has yet to be fulfilled for pollination ecology.
Wasps (Dolichovespula and Vespula spp.) worked predominantly upwards when foraging for nectar on inflorescences of the protogynous Scrophularia aquatica, in which the standing crop of nectar sugar per flower showed no clear pattern of vertical distribution up an inflorescence. Bumblebees taking nectar (Bombus hortorum visiting legally, and certain individuals of B. terrestris which positioned themselves head-upwards while taking nectar through holes bitten in the corolla) worked predominantly upwards on the racemose inflorescences of Linaria vulgaris, although the standing crop of nectar sugar per open flower increased up the raceme. Individuals of B. terrestris which robbed Linaria flowers in a head-down position worked predominantly downwards on inflorescences. The upward or downward directionality of intra-inflorescence movements by foraging insects may depend in part on the position these adopt during their flower visits.
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