DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Assessing multi-scale drivers of pollinator assembly and plant-pollinator network architecture in the context of prairie restoration

论文研究：评估草原恢复背景下传粉媒介聚集和植物传粉媒介网络架构的多尺度驱动因素

• 批准号: 1600525
• 负责人: Bryan Foster
• 金额: $ 1.94万
• 依托单位: University of Kansas Center for Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-06-01 至 2019-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1600525&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: DISSERTATION; RESEARCH; Assessing; multi; scale

Pollinators are key to the maintenance of Earth's biodiversity because almost 90% of flowering plants rely on animal pollinators to reproduce. Pollinators are also a vital component of global agriculture, and pollination services by insects are worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Given their importance, it is critical that we develop an understanding of how insect pollinator communities interact with plants across complex landscapes that are often heavily modified by humans. Researchers have recently begun using "network" approaches to study plant-pollinator interactions across entire ecological communities. A plant-pollinator network can be visualized as a "web" of all interactions between pollinators and plants at a given place. By building and evaluating plant-pollinator networks, researchers can, for example, assess whether pollination at a given site will remain stable in the face of disturbance or loss of species. This is especially relevant, considering that human-induced stressors, such as habitat loss and pesticide use, are causing pollinator declines worldwide. This research will use a new genetic approach to determine which plant species are pollinated by which bee species in ten Kansas prairies. Data will be used to construct plant-pollinator networks to assess the potential effect of disturbance and loss of pollinator species on pollination services across human-modified landscapes. As part of this project, the research team will conduct pollinator ecology workshops for middle- and high school students aspiring to be first-generation college graduates. Plant-pollinator networks are typically constructed from observations of insects landing on flowers (i.e., "visitation networks"). Few researchers have evaluated these insects for the presence and species identities of pollen carried between flowers; doing so based on pollen morphology is especially time-consuming. In this project, investigators will use metabarcoding to identify pollen carried by native bees collected across ten study sites. Several structural properties of the resulting pollen transport networks will be compared to the properties of networks based on visitation data alone. Investigators predict that: A) pollen transport networks will exhibit greater network-level specialization than visitation networks, and B) pollen transport networks will be less nested than visitation networks, indicating that plant-pollinator interactions could be more susceptible to species loss than the visitation data, alone, would suggest.

传粉媒介是维持地球生物多样性的关键，因为几乎90%的开花植物依靠动物传粉媒介进行繁殖。传粉媒介也是全球农业的重要组成部分，昆虫的授粉服务每年价值数千亿美元。鉴于它们的重要性，我们必须了解昆虫传粉者群落如何在经常被人类严重改变的复杂景观中与植物相互作用。研究人员最近开始使用“网络”方法来研究整个生态群落中植物与传粉者的相互作用。植物-传粉者网络可以被可视化为传粉者和给定地点植物之间所有相互作用的“网络”。例如，通过建立和评估植物传粉者网络，研究人员可以评估在面对干扰或物种丧失时，特定地点的传粉是否能保持稳定。考虑到人类引起的压力因素，如栖息地丧失和农药使用，正在导致世界范围内传粉媒介的减少，这一点尤为重要。这项研究将使用一种新的遗传方法来确定在10个堪萨斯大草原上哪种植物由哪种蜜蜂授粉。数据将用于构建植物-传粉媒介网络，以评估传粉媒介物种的干扰和丧失对人类改造景观中传粉服务的潜在影响。作为该项目的一部分，研究小组将为有志成为第一代大学毕业生的中学生和高中生举办传粉者生态学研讨会。植物传粉者网络通常是根据对昆虫落在花上的观察构建的（即“访问网络”）。很少有研究人员评估这些昆虫在花间携带花粉的存在和物种特征；根据花粉形态来做这样的工作尤其耗时。在这个项目中，研究人员将使用元条形码来识别从十个研究地点收集的本地蜜蜂携带的花粉。所得到的花粉运输网络的一些结构特性将与仅基于访问数据的网络的特性进行比较。研究人员预测：A)花粉运输网络将比来访网络表现出更大的网络级专业化，B)花粉运输网络将比来访网络更少嵌套，这表明植物与传粉者的相互作用可能比单独的来访数据更容易导致物种损失。