Multivariate flower phenotype and proboscis length shape specialised pollination niches
Data files
Oct 10, 2025 version files 28.11 KB
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Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt
3.34 KB
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NMDSVerb.txt
5.45 KB
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README.md
4.39 KB
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Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R
7.80 KB
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TraitMatchingMEan2.txt
6.37 KB
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TraitMatchingXpollinatorsXeachcorolla.txt
768 B
Abstract
By analysing multivariate floral traits and the topology of the pollination network in a community of coexisting plant species that share pollinators, we investigated whether plant-pollinator interactions are influenced by multivariate flower phenotype and/or morphological traits.
Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.w3r228144
Description of the data and file structure
We have submitted: 1) a matrix describing a quantitative interaction network between vervain species and their pollinators (Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt), 2) a matrix describing the multivariate flower phenotype of the vervain species (NMDSVerb.txt), 3) the mean corolla tube length of the vervain species and the mean proboscis length of the pollinator species (TraitMatchingMEan2.txt) and 4) the individual corolla tube and proboscis lengths (TraitMatchingXpollinatorsXeachcorolla.txt) and 5) R script for running all the analyses described in the article (Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R).
Files 1, 2, 3 and 4 are needed to succesfully run the file 5) R script including all the analyses shown in the article.
The matrix (Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt) was built by recording animal visits to the flowers of the 11 vervain species present in the community once a week for 50 days during two consecutive flowering seasons between October 2017 and May 2019. We recorded flower visitors during 62.5 observation hours in 375 observation periods of 10 minutes each. We focused this study on diurnal pollinators, thus we observed flower visitors on sunny days between 10:00 am to 05:00 pm. In each observation period, we recorded the number of flowers visited per insect species and the total number of flowers observed on a given plant species. We followed the criterion that visitation was only recorded when a flower visitor introduced its mouthpart into the flower tube (i.e. pollen transfer is favoured by the contact of the animal’s proboscis with the anthers and stigma).
Code/software
The script (Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R) was running using R software and the packages cited below.
Software
R Core Team (2024) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. Available at: https://www.R -project.org/. version 4.4.1
Packages
‘bipartite’ package v. 2.16 (Dormann et al. 2008)
‘agricolae’ (de Mendiburu & de Mendiburu 2019)
‘gplots’ (Warnes et al. 2016)
pavo 2.2.0 package (Maia et al. 2019)
Brief description of files included
TraitMatchingMEan2.txt
Contains average trait-matching values (in mm) between corolla tube length and pollinator proboscis length for each plant–pollinator pair.
Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt
Bipartite network of interactions between Verbenaceae species and their pollinators, listing the interacting plant and pollinator species. The number of each cell shows the visitation rate of a given pollinator species on a given vervain species expressed as mean number of visited flower/total number of observed flower per observation period.
NMDSVerb.txt
Results of the Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) analysis based on multivariate floral traits. Used to visualise trait similarity among Verbenaceae species. As explained in the main text of the article and in the supplementary material the nine variables included describes the multivariate flower phenotype of the studied vervain species as follow. Flower color: color.xpc1 and color.pc2 (without units, there are the CP1 and CP2 values from a Principal component Analyses of the corolla reflectance spectra), Flower shape: forma.pc1 and forma.pc2 (without units, there are the CP1 and CP2 values from a landmark-based geometric morphometric analysis), Flower size: long.corola (mean corolla tube length in mm), reward amount: cant.nectar (volume of nectar), reward quality: azucar.flor (percentage of sugar) and flower display: number of flowers (n.flores) and inflorescence area in mm2 (area.inflor).
Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R
R script used to process the dataset, compute trait-matching metrics, and perform NMDS and network analyses.
TraitMatchingXpollinatorsXeachcorolla.txt
Detailed trait-matching values for individual pollinators (proboscis length in mm) across each recorded corolla length (in mm) per plant species. This file captures intra-specific variation in trait-matching.
Contact
For questions about the dataset or analysis, please contact the corresponding author.
We used plant-pollinator network topology to objectively characterise pollination niches. We built the quantitative plant-pollinator interaction matrix assigning to each cell the average visitation rate (i.e. number of visited flowers per observation period) across observation periods of each pollinator morphospecies (j columns) to a given plant species (i rows). We first tested whether the interaction network exhibited a nested and/or modular structure. We detected the main pollinators in each module taking into account the individualisation of species with greater importance in the network modules recognition.To characterise the overall variation in floral phenotype among the 11 vervain species, we constructed a matrix containing nine quantitative variables of flower measurements from five individuals per species (N=55). The variables included were: floral display (number of flowers per inflorescence and inflorescence area), flower colour (PC1 and PC2 coefficients of the PCA of the reflectance data), flower shape (PC1 and PC2 coefficients of the geometric morphometric analysis of corolla shape in frontal view and corolla tube length) and nectar reward (nectar volume and amount of sugar per flower). Besides, we also tested whether the specialised pollination niches recognised by the modularity network analysis were associated with the morphological correspondence between flowers and probosces and trait-matching.