Ecosystem function and pollination across a major ecotone: boreal forest, tree-line & tundra

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Pollination is a crucial ecosystem service that is now recognized as in jeopardy in many places world-wide. Pollination ecology has contributed to understandings of basic botany and zoology, as well as to mutualisms, co-evolution, competition, character displacement, optimal processes in pollinator nutrition and plant reproduction, population genetics, sustainable ecosystem productivity in nature, forestry and agriculture, and recently to the complex field of ecosystem structure and function. Pollination studies in the north (Arctic & Boreal) are few. Also, little attention has been given to comparative studies across ecotones. The proposed research is for comparative studies that span the interface between the boreal forest and Arctic tundra in the complex mosaics of habitats across the tree line of the Hudson Bay lowlands. Studies on the North-South transect from Churchill to Gillam, and both North-South and East-West in Wapusk National Park will produce much needed new information on the pollination biology of Canada's northern flora and its pollination interactions with its insect fauna. The project proposes to take an ecosystemic approach to examining comparatively the complexity of pollinator-plant, plant-plant, and pollinator-pollinator interactions so as to document ecological connectance webs, address the importance of biodiversity, and consider the relative importance of the drivers of ecosystem function and structure (e.g. climatic and edaphic harshness (temperature, permafrost); vegetation (forest and tundra, both wet and dry); age since glaciation; altitude; and fire). The region is comparatively well-known floristically and faunistically, but is now undergoing rapid climate change. Testing simple correlative hypotheses and complex models will help explain how ecosystem complexity, stucture, function, and integrity are inter-related and have co-evolved in the region and for eco-biogeography generally.