Spatiotemporal variation in the role of floral traits in shaping tropical plant-pollinator interactions

0552060 - BC 2023 RIV US eng J - Journal Article
Klomberg, Y. - Tropek, Robert - Mertens, J. E. J. - Kobe, I. N. - Hodeček, J. - Fominka, N. T. - Souto-Vilarós, D. - Janečková, P. - Janeček, Š. … Total 10 authors
Spatiotemporal variation in the role of floral traits in shaping tropical plant-pollinator interactions.
Ecology Letters. Roč. 25, č. 4 (2022), s. 839-850. ISSN 1461-023X. E-ISSN 1461-0248
Institutional support: RVO:60077344
Keywords : afrotropics * foraging behaviour * Mount Cameroon National Park
OECD category: Plant sciences, botany
Impact factor: 8.8, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.13958

The pollination syndrome hypothesis predicts that plants pollinated by the same pollinator group bear convergent combinations of specific floral functional traits. Nevertheless, some studies have shown that these combinations predict pollinators with relatively low accuracy. This discrepancy may be caused by changes in the importance of specific floral traits for different pollinator groups and under different environmental conditions. To explore this, we studied pollination systems and floral traits along an elevational gradient on Mount Cameroon during wet and dry seasons. Using Random Forest (Machine Learning) models, allowing the ranking of traits by their relative importance, we demonstrated that some floral traits are more important than others for pollinators. However, the distribution and importance of traits vary under different environmental conditions. Our results imply the need to improve our trait-based understanding of plant-pollinator interactions to better inform the debate surrounding the pollination syndrome hypothesis.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0338972