Native birds may have been underestimated as pollinators of the New Zealand flora due to their early decline in abundance and diversity on the mainland. This paper reconsiders the relative importance of birds and insects as pollinators to eight native flowering plants, representing a range of pollination syndromes, on two offshore island refuges. Experimental manipulations were made on five of ...

September 2, 2016 Biodiversity can provide an economic insurance value against the uncertain provision of ecosystem services for risk-averse economic agents. For uncertain pollination services, we determine the risk premium and the economic insurance value of wild pollinators in almond orchards for a risk-averse farmer. For this, we describe pollination services as a distribution, which can be ...

SUMMARY There is increasing world-wide concern about the impact of the introduction of exotic species on ecological communities. Since many exotic plants depend on native pollinators to successfully establish, it is of paramount importance that we understand precisely how exotic species integrate into existing plant-pollinator communities. In this manuscript, we have studied a global data base ...

Climate change will cause geographic range shifts for pollinators and major crops, with global implications for food security and rural livelihoods. However, little is known about the potential for coupled impacts of climate change on pollinators and crops. Coffee production exemplifies this issue, because large losses in areas suitable for coffee production have been projected due to climate c...

1. Pollinator declines caused by forage habitat loss threaten insect pollination services. Pollinating insects depend on adequate floral resources, and their ability to track these resources. Variability of these resources and the effect on insect foraging choice is poorly understood. 2. We record patterns of visitation to six wildflower species and test the hypotheses that: pollinators prefere...

Highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum L.) is an important crop grown throughout Florida. Currently, most blueberry growers use honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) to provide pollination services for highbush blueberries even though bumble bees (Bombus spp.) have been shown to be more efficient at pollinating blueberries on a per bee basis. In general, contribution of bumble bees to the pollinatio...

Obligate mutualistic nursery pollination systems between insects and plants have led to substantial codiversification involving at least some parallel cladogenesis, as documented in Yucca, Ficus and Phyllanthaceae. In such systems, pollinators are generally species specific thus limiting hybridization and introgression among interfertile host species. Nevertheless, in the three systems, cases o...

Flowers are multisensory displays used by plants to influence the behavior of pollinators. Although we know a great deal about how individual signal components are produced by plants and detected or learned by pollinators, very few experiments directly address the function of floral signal complexity, i.e. how the multicomponent nature of these signals benefits plant or pollinator. Yet, experim...

Insect pollinators provide a crucial ecosystem service, but are under threat. Urban areas could be important for pollinators, though their value relative to other habitats is poorly known. We compared pollinator communities using quantified flower-visitation networks in 36 sites (each 1 km(2)) in three landscapes: urban, farmland and nature reserves. Overall, flower-visitor abundance and specie...