Floral visitors in urban gardens and natural areas: Diversity and interaction networks in a neotropical urban landscape

Marín, Linda; Martinez-Sanchez, Mariana Esther; Sagot, Philippe; Navarrete, Darío; Morales, Helda

doi:10.1016/j.baae.2019.10.003

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…With more (food) resources available close to the colonies, the bees may have explored and familiarised themselves with a smaller foraging range around their nests, resulting in an overall better knowledge of the surrounding landscape. Our results thus agree with previous findings showing that urban gardens provided higher flowering species richness than natural areas across seasons (Kaluza et al, 2016; Marín et al, 2020), which greatly increased population growth of stingless bees due to a continuous supply of floral resources (Kaluza et al, 2018). Besides resource abundance, urbanisation associated with spatial aggregation of resources, coarse/fine structure of landscape and costs of travelling and searching may influence bee homing range.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Homing ability in a tropical Asian stingless bee is influenced by interaction between release distances and urbanisation

Wayo

Leonhardt

Sritongchuay

et al. 2022

Ecological Entomology

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1. Bee homing capacity determines the maximum distance/area from/around the nest that workers can travel to exploit resources. However, homing ranges have been hardly examined in tropical Asian stingless bee species or in relation to anthropogenic land-use changes.2. Here, we used translocation experiments, where we released marked bees at different distances from the colony, to evaluate the maximum homing distance of Tetragonula fuscobalteata in 10 different anthropogenic landscapes in Southern Thailand.3. Our results show that typical and maximum homing distances (i.e., distances where 50% and 90% of released bees failed to return, respectively) were estimated to be 240 and 595 m, respectively. We found that bee homing rates were not affected by forest proximity or surrounding landscape composition within 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600 m radii, but that they were influenced by the interaction between release distances from the colony and the proportion of urbanised cover at a 100 m radius. Bee homing rates decreased with increasing release distances for colonies placed in areas with higher proportions of urbanised land within a 100 m radius.4. This suggests that urbanised areas (e.g., urban or suburban gardens, home gardens, backyards) provided sufficient food resources close to colonies, resulting in smaller foraging ranges.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Homing ability in a tropical Asian stingless bee is influenced by interaction between release distances and urbanisation

Wayo

Leonhardt

Sritongchuay

et al. 2022

Ecological Entomology

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“…Privately owned residential gardens or yards (hereafter referred to as ‘gardens’) are a particularly valuable type of urban green space for insect pollinators as they are often (but not always) actively managed by gardeners to provide ornamental displays of flowering plants, which provide pollinators with food in the form of nectar and pollen. As a result, diverse pollinator communities can be found in gardens throughout the world (Baldock et al., 2019; Fetridge et al., 2008; Marín et al., 2020; Martins et al., 2017; Staab et al., 2020). Despite their small individual size, residential gardens collectively cover 16%–36% of cities in different countries (Baldock et al., 2019; Colding et al., 2006; Loram et al., 2007; Mathieu et al., 2007; Ossola et al., 2021) and provide an estimated 85% of nectar in urban areas in the UK (Tew et al., 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turnover in floral composition explains species diversity and temporal stability in the nectar supply of urban residential gardens

Tew

Baldock

Vaughan

et al. 2022

Journal of Applied Ecology

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Residential gardens are a valuable habitat for insect pollinators worldwide, but differences in individual gardening practices substantially affect their floral composition. It is important to understand how the floral resource supply of gardens varies in both space and time so we can develop evidence‐based management recommendations to support pollinator conservation in towns and cities. We surveyed 59 residential gardens in the city of Bristol, UK, at monthly intervals from March to October. For each of 472 garden surveys, we combined floral abundances with nectar sugar data to quantify the nectar production of each garden, investigating the magnitude, temporal stability, and diversity and composition of garden nectar supplies. We found that individual gardens differ markedly in the quantity of nectar sugar they supply (from 2 to 1,662 g), and nectar production is higher in more affluent neighbourhoods, but not in larger gardens. Nectar supply peaks in July (mid‐summer), when more plant taxa are in flower, but temporal patterns vary among individual gardens. At larger spatial scales, temporal variability averages out through the portfolio effect, meaning insect pollinators foraging across many gardens in urban landscapes have access to a relatively stable and continuous supply of nectar through the year. Turnover in species composition among gardens leads to an extremely high overall plant richness, with 636 taxa recorded flowering. The nectar supply is dominated by non‐natives, which provide 91% of all nectar sugar, while shrubs are the main plant life form contributing to nectar production (58%). Two‐thirds of nectar sugar is only available to relatively specialised pollinators, leaving just one‐third that is accessible to all. Synthesis and applications. By measuring nectar supply in residential gardens, our study demonstrates that pollinator‐friendly management, affecting garden quality, is more important than the size of a garden, giving every gardener an opportunity to contribute to pollinator conservation in urban areas. For gardeners interested in increasing the value of their land to foraging pollinators, we recommend planting nectar‐rich shrubs with complementary flowering periods and prioritising flowers with an open structure in late summer and autumn.

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“…It is important to highlight that botanical gardens as urban parks are key instruments to preserve biodiversity in urban areas and maintain the community previously established in that area (Maruyama et al, 2019;Marín et al, 2020); also, they are unvaluable for scientific investigations (Chen & Sun, 2018), such as this one.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Flower Visitation by Bees, Wasps and Ants: Revealing How a Community of Flower-Visitors Establish Interaction Networks in a Botanical Garden

et al. 2022

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The Hymnoptera order includes several flower-visiting insects (e.g. ants, bees, and wasps) and the coexistence of many different species in the same community can generate interspecific competition. Notwithstanding shared communities, research which evaluates how these taxonomic groups influence a whole community of flower-visiting Hymenoptera is lacking. Moreover, abiotic factors can also impact these floral visits, because each organism responds differently to climatic variations. The goal of this study is to evaluate abiotic factors, specifically relative air humidity and air temperature, which may be able to impact the number and the frequency of interactions between hymenopterans and flowers and to assess the composition and niche organization, by making use of interaction networks, of the entire community of flower-visiting Hymenoptera at the botanical garden of the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro. For the duration of a year, we took samples in that botanical garden, compartmentalizing the collections temporally in accordance with the time of the insects’ shift (morning or afternoon). We observed a positive influence of air temperature on the number of ant interactions and visits. It is also possible to observe that most of these interaction networks exhibited a nested and non-modular pattern and an average level of network specialization. In addition, bees stood out as the species with the highest frequency of visits and with the most generalist behavior. This study demonstrates how a botanical garden can sustain a diverse community of floral visiting Hymenoptera in an urban environment and why it consists in an important tool for biodiversity conservation.

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Floral visitors in urban gardens and natural areas: Diversity and interaction networks in a neotropical urban landscape

Cited by 14 publications

References 29 publications

Homing ability in a tropical Asian stingless bee is influenced by interaction between release distances and urbanisation

Homing ability in a tropical Asian stingless bee is influenced by interaction between release distances and urbanisation

Turnover in floral composition explains species diversity and temporal stability in the nectar supply of urban residential gardens

Flower Visitation by Bees, Wasps and Ants: Revealing How a Community of Flower-Visitors Establish Interaction Networks in a Botanical Garden

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