Flowering plant communities mediate the effects of habitat composition and configuration on wild pollinator communities
Data files
Sep 12, 2024 version files 310.40 KB
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Gillespie_et_al._2024_Functional_Ecology_Data.xlsx
308.95 KB
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README.md
1.46 KB
Abstract
There is strong evidence that landscape-scale factors such as habitat diversity, composition, and configuration are important drivers of declines in pollinators and pollination services. However, context and species-specific responses make it challenging to draw general conclusions about the most important components of landscapes that support diverse and abundant pollinator communities. In this study, we took a functional traits approach to community assembly and tested the hypothesis that landscape properties act most strongly on pollinators indirectly, through their influence on flowering plant communities. Using plant and pollinator data from 96 landscapes in Britain, we tested the associations between plant and pollinator communities and local environmental factors, such as habitat cover and configuration, using path analysis based on Mantel and partial Mantel statistics. When all pollinators were considered, we found that the environmental factors had stronger links to the composition of flowering plant communities than to the composition of pollinator communities. Further, the flowering plant community was strongly linked to the pollinator community suggesting a mediating role between land use and pollinators. When separating the pollinator community into taxonomic groups, we found the same result for hoverflies, but wild bees were linked to both environmental factors and flowering plants. We further explored these links with structural equation models using the response-effect trait framework as a guiding principle. We found strong evidence that land use composition and configuration influence the trait distribution and functional diversity of the pollinator community via plant community composition. These findings suggest that the indirect effect of land use on pollinators via flowering plants should be considered in informing the design of pollinator-friendly landscapes and in future research on the effects of land use and management on wild pollinators.
README: Flowering plant communities mediate the effects of habitat composition and configuration on wild pollinator communities
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2cbx
Description of the data and file structure
This dataset contains three matrices and two metadata tables. The pollinator matrix is a site x species table of pollinators caught by pan trapping during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The abundance values are pooled from 3 trapping sessions each year.
The plant matrix is a site x species table of flowering plants recorded from transects during the same summers. Abundance data are the pooled number of "floral units" (e.g., single flowers, capitula, etc.) from 3 transect recording sessions each year.
The Env_matrix sheet provides all the environmental data recorded from each site (corresponding to a 2x2km grid square) that was used in the paper.
The metadata sheet describes the headings for the environmental data. The species abbreviations sheet provides the species list corresponding to the plant and pollinator matrices.
Files and variables
File: Gillespie_et_al._2024_Functional_Ecology_Data.xlsx
Description: An excel file containing plant and pollinator site x species matrices and the environmental data matrix
Variables
- All variables are defined in the metadata and Species Abbreviations sheets
Code/software
MS Excel
Access information
NA