Community level niche overlap and broad scale biogeographic patterns of bee communities are driven by phylogenetic history

Abstract

Aim Because the ecological similarity between species is expected to increase with relatedness and that speciation is a local process, phylogeny may provide a common measure for the influence of ecological and biogeographic processes on community assembly. We tested if similarities in floral visitation patterns within communities and the phylogenetic beta‐diversity among communities were related to the position of bees within the bee phylogeny. Location Global. Methods We combined a genus level phylogeny with within‐genera phylogenies for the bee species occurring within 18 globally distributed bee‐flower networks. Networks consisted of a matrix of bee and plant species and information on whether or not a bee species had been observed visiting flowers of a given plant species. For each network, we used Abouheif's Cmean to test if the similarity in floral associations (niche similarity) between bees and the number of plant species visited displayed a significant phylogenetic signal. To test if biogeography influenced the relatedness among species within networks we tested if the phylogenetic beta‐diversity increased with geographical distance and dissimilarity in climatic conditions among networks. Results We found a phylogenetic signal for niche similarity in only 50% of the bee‐flower networks. However, network size influenced the likelihood of observing a phylogenetic signal and for seven of the eight bee‐flower networks with >20 species it was statistically significant. On a global scale, the phylogenetic beta‐diversity increased with geographical distances and with climatic dissimilarity between sites. Main conclusions Bee communities are structured by processes of speciation and migration so that regional species pools are dominated by a subset of the global phylogenetic clades, resulting in increasing phylogenetic beta‐diversity with geographical distance. Moreover, ecological filtering processes operating at both local (floral resource use) and continental (climatic constraints) scale determine the distribution of species among resources and geographical regions. The assembly of bee communities should therefore be understood as a product of both biogeographic and community ecological processes.

Global-scale drivers of crop visitor diversity and the historical development of agriculture

“…Based on the current understanding of the biogeographic histories of the 27 crops we sampled, more bee genera were supported in the Neotropics, Indomalaya and Afrotropics by native crops compared to exotic crops. Since closely related bees tend to visit closely related plants [49], native crop assemblages might support more bee genera if they are more taxonomically diverse, but this did not appear to explain our results (see electronic supplementary material). Thus, agricultural landscapes dominated by native crops are expected to support greater bee genus diversity in the predominantly tropical biogeographic realms.…”

Pollinator shifts, contingent evolution, and evolutionary constraint drive floral disparity in Salvia (Lamiaceae): Evidence from morphometrics and phylogenetic comparative methods

“…Calosphace. We have found no evidence to suggest the bee faunas are strikingly functionally different between the NW and OW; indeed, the bee families Andrenidae, Apidae, Colletidae, Halictidae, and Megachilidae involved in Salvia pollination are common across the NW and OW (Danforth et al 2013;Hedtke et al 2013;Sydenham et al 2017). The only family of bees missing in the NW is the small-sized Melittidae, and there are only a few observations of these visiting OW Salvia (Özbek 2014).…”

“…2013; Sydenham et al. 2017). The only family of bees missing in the NW is the small‐sized Melittidae, and there are only a few observations of these visiting OW Salvia (Özbek 2014).…”

A dataset of multi-functional ecological traits of Brazilian bees

“…Pollination success is related to pollinator species occurrence and availability 16 , but it also depends on the biological community assembly 17,[20][21][22] and on the relationship between flower traits (e.g., size and morphology) and the body size of its visitors 23 . Castilla et al 24 showed that pollinator body size contributes to plant seed viability but is apparently not related to long-distance genetic flow.…”