Using Metabarcoding to Investigate the Strength of Plant-Pollinator Interactions From Surveys of Visits to DNA Sequences

The ongoing decline in pollinators and increasing concerns about pollination services require a better understanding of complex networks, particularly their response to global climate change. While metabarcoding is increasingly used for the identification taxa DNA mixtures, its reliability providing quantitative information on plant-pollinator interactions still subject debate. Combining microscopy, we investigated relationships between number composition sequences abundance pollen insect loads (IPL) how two are linked visits. Our findings confirm that more effective than microscopy identifying plant species IPL. For given species, found strong positive relationship amount IPL sequences. was stable across even if co-occurring (hereafter “co-occurring pollen”) tended reduce sequence yield (number obtained from one grain) species. We also count frequency visits, amounts results demonstrate assessing strength broader perspective analyses networks.