Urban drivers of plant‐pollinator interactions | Semantic Scholar (2024)

The complexity with which urbanization, a green corridor, and pollinator communities can shape the reproductive investment and fitness of native plant populations is demonstrated.

To enhance urban pollinator conservation, urban residents can select ornamental plants from a list of ‘highly attractive’ plant taxa, or can allow some of the highly attractive ‘weeds’ to persist in their gardens.

This work reviews how trait matching facilitates the persistence of interactions and creation of new interactions in urban plant–pollinator networks, and shows how the application of trait matching can aid management practices, facilitating the design and creation of sustainable green spaces that will accommodate functionally diverse pollinators and plants within the urban matrix.

It is found that pollen limitation is high in urban environments and depends of plant traits such as pollinator dependency, and ecologically and functionally specialized plants are at risk of pollen limitation across land use categories.

Investigation of landscape effects on pollinator functional composition and their interactions with four dominant mangrove species in the Caribbean coast of Colombia finds that Mangrove patch size decreased the richness of ground nesting wasps whereas increased network specialization, and urban size decreasedThe richness of predators, large-sized species, and ground-nesting wasps.

It is argued that pollinators put high-priority and high-impact urban conservation within reach, and transforming how environmental managers view the city can improve citizen engagement and contribute to the development of more sustainable urbanization.

The results show that urbanization has negative effects on insect conservation, resulting in less diverse and specialized plant-galling networks in urban environments, which suggests that plant–herbivore communities can be taxonomically and functionally impoverished in urbanized habitats.

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Modifications of plant-pollinator interactions along an urbanisation gradient based on the study of their morphological relationships show that open flower plant species and their specific flower-visitors are especially sensitive to increasing urbanisation.

There is a need for studies of pollinator species composition and relative abundance, rather than simply species richness and aggregate abundance, to identify the species that are lost and gained with increasing land-use change.

Three of the five major drivers of global environmental change have previously unknown interactive effects on plant-pollinator mutualisms that could not be predicted from studies of individual drivers in isolation.

Observational, theoretical, and experimental studies of temporal and spatial variation in plant-pollinator interaction networks are reviewed to establish a foundation for future studies to incorporate perspectives in spatiotemporal variation.

A spatially explicit approach is needed to develop specific recommendations regarding the design of agricultural landscapes to sustain wild pollinator communities and the services they provide, and it is predicted that pollination services will be maximized by providing islands of nesting habitat where interisland distance matches mean foraging distances of wild pollinators.

Tolerance in pollination networks contrasts with catastrophic declines reported from standard food webs, and the most–linked pollinators were bumble–bees and some solitary bees, which should receive special attention in efforts to conserve temperate pollination systems.

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