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Floral identity and availability along with surrounding landscapes affect pollinator communities in eastern Tennessee

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Abstract

Context

Anthropogenic land use can significantly alter insect communities and may threaten services provided by beneficial flower-visiting insects. However, the plant community composition may interact with surrounding land use to affect insects in a way that is not well understood.

Objectives

Our goal was to disentangle the effect of the background plant community on the flowering visiting insect community composition from the independent effect of surrounding land use.

Methods

We planted four fixed community garden plots, three that each contained six species of one plant family (Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Lamiaceae) and one that was a mixed community plot, controlling the number of individuals and species identity of the plants. We then replicated these four fixed plots across five different landscapes in eastern Tennessee and surveyed the insects that visited the flowers for 2 years.

Results

Both the identity and abundance of floral resources were strong drivers of flower-visiting insect abundance, with floral display being the single largest driver. Independent of the plant community, specific pollinating insects responded to different types of land use at different radii around each site. Total flower visitor and soldier beetle abundance increased with agricultural land use at 500 and 2000 m, respectively. On the other hand, sweat bee abundance increased with semi-natural land use at 2000 m and honey bee abundance increased with developed land use at 1000 m.

Conclusion

Independent of plant community composition, surrounding land use affected the abundance, diversity, and composition of flower-visiting insects. However, there was not one consistent land use effect across all flower-visiting insects.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the University of Tennessee (UT), the UT Institute of Agriculture, the UT Gardens, and the UT Ag Research and Education Centers, including the Plateau AgResearch Center, the Organic Crops Unit, and the Forest Research and Education Center, for allowing us to do research on their lands, especially K. Hoyt, B. Simpson, W. Hitch, H. Jones, J. Newburn, and W. Lively. We would also like to thank D. Matheson, S. Collins, and A. Murray for field assistance and N. Oldham for assisting with hoverfly identification. Thanks go also to S. Droege for lending his expertise in bee identification. We are also grateful to Bayer, for the Feed-A-Bee grant that funded our Feed-A-Bee research plots. Thank you to the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the UT for the support of this project.

Funding

Funding provided by Bayer Fund (Grant No. Feed A Bee).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA

    Amani Khalil & Laura Russo

  2. Department of Plant Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA

    Virginia Sykes

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  1. Amani Khalil
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  2. Virginia Sykes
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by AK and LR. The first draft of the manuscript was written by AK and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Laura Russo.

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Khalil, A., Sykes, V. & Russo, L. Floral identity and availability along with surrounding landscapes affect pollinator communities in eastern Tennessee. Landsc Ecol 38, 2623–2638 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01728-5

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