CAREER: Advancing Scientific Knowledge of Tropical Mutualistic Network Science and Public Knowledge of Tropical Bee Importance

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Tropical forests are the lungs of our planet and home to most species that live on land. Bees play an important role in maintaining tropical diversity by pollinating plants, which can then grow seeds and fruits that animals eat. Tropical bees help provide humans with vanilla, avocados, cashews, passion fruit and coffee, to name a few. In fact, tropical bees are one of the most essential organisms on the planet for their central role in crop production and biodiversity maintenance. This project will test a restoration strategy to recover and protect tropical bees. It features a big experiment and observations of bees pollinating plants at many sites along the side of a mountain range in Costa Rica. Researchers will determine which species of bees visit which species of flowers, allowing them to create a detailed map (or “network”) of interactions. Another goal is to raise public awareness of tropical bees and their importance. Through targeted outreach, students and the public will learn about the many different services provided by native species of stingless bees. Network theory is a useful tool to achieve a greater understanding of the connections between communities and ecosystem function. This project will quantify bee-plant network properties along a tropical elevational gradient and relate those network-level metrics to pollination success in an economically important crop species. A primary goal is to quantify the degree of vulnerability of pollination services among elevations in tropical ecosystems. Network theory will be used to select plant species for use in a restoration experiment. This is important because plant species differ by orders of magnitude in the number of interactions they can support and in the tropics, restoration and conservation practitioners have thousands of plant species to choose among. Plant species determined to be highly connected (based on empirical bee-plant networks) will be tested for their role in restoring bee communities and ecosystem function. If network theory is supported, this study will provide guidelines to land managers and practitioners on best practices to accelerate tropical forest restoration broadly. Locally, the results will be used to inform restoration within the Bellbird Biological Corridor, an internationally recognized model corridor project.This project is jointly funded by the Population and Community Ecology program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.