Modern approaches for leveraging biodiversity collections to understand change in plant-insect interactions

Abstract

Research on plant-pollinator interactions requires a diversity of perspectives and approaches, and documenting changing pollinator-plant interactions due to declining insect diversity and climate change is especially challenging. Natural history collections are increasingly important for such research and can provide ecological information across broad spatial and temporal scales. Here, we describe novel approaches that integrate museum specimens from insect and plant collections with field observations to quantify pollen networks over large spatial and temporal gradients. We present methodological strategies for evaluating insect-pollen network parameters based on pollen collected from museum insect specimens. These methods provide insight into spatial and temporal variation in pollen-insect interactions and complement other approaches to studying pollination, such as pollinator observation networks and flower enclosure experiments. We present example data from butterfly pollen networks over the past century in the Great Basin Desert and Sierra Nevada Mountains, United States. Complementary to these approaches, we describe rapid pollen identification methods that can increase speed and accuracy of taxonomic determinations, using pollen grains collected from herbarium specimens. As an example, we describe a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automate identification of pollen. We extracted images of pollen grains from 21 common species from herbarium specimens at the University of Nevada Reno (RENO). The CNN model achieved exceptional accuracy of identification, with a correct classification rate of 98.8%. These and similar approaches can transform the way we estimate pollination network parameters and greatly change inferences from existing networks, which have exploded over the past few decades. These techniques also allow us to address critical ecological questions related to mutualistic networks, community ecology, and conservation biology. Museum collections remain a bountiful source of data for biodiversity science and understanding global change.

Conservation museomics

“…Such combinations unveil the potential for insight into the nature of species interactions over time that will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of historical community structures, trophic dynamics, extinction dynamics, and the importance of functional diversity for ecosystem resilience. With the convergence of accessible and broader‐scale data sets from various collections, researchers can investigate historical species interactions, such as predator–prey relationships and mutualistic associations, competition among native and invasive species (Bodt et al., 2020), and other coevolutionary relationships between species that occur over extended periods (Balmaki et al., 2022).…”

Considering pollinators' ecosystem services in the remediation and restoration of contaminated lands: Overview of research and its gaps

“…Theiss et al (2007) reported that wasps effectively pollinated some milkweed ( Asclepias ) species, even as butterflies were ineffective. Butterflies are frequently invoked as pollinators (e.g., Balmaki et al, 2022; Tan et al, 2023) but often carry very little pollen (Larson et al, 2018). Beetles are recognized as important pollinators in tropical regions but have received less attention in temperate latitudes (Bernhardt, 2000; Sayers et al, 2019).…”