RESUMO
Most angiosperms rely on animal pollination for reproduction, but the dependence on specific pollinator groups varies greatly between species and localities. Notably, such dependence may be influenced by both floral traits and environmental conditions. Despite its importance, their joint contribution has rarely been studied at the assemblage level. At two elevations on the Caribbean island of Dominica, we measured the floral traits and the relative contributions of insects versus hummingbirds as pollinators of plants in the Rubiaceae family. Pollinator importance was measured as visitation rate (VR) and single visit pollen deposition (SVD), which were combined to assess overall pollinator effectiveness (PE). In the wet and cool Dominican highland, we found that hummingbirds were relatively more frequent and effective pollinators than insects, whereas insects and hummingbirds were equally frequent and effective pollinators at the warmer and less rainy midelevation. Furthermore, floral traits correlated independently of environment with the relative importance of pollinators, hummingbirds being more important in plant species having flowers with long and wide corollas producing higher volumes of dilute nectar. Our findings show that both environmental conditions and floral traits influence whether insects or hummingbirds are the most important pollinators of plants in the Rubiaceae family, highlighting the complexity of plant-pollinator systems.
Assuntos
Aves , Insetos , Polinização , Rubiaceae/fisiologia , Altitude , Animais , Aves/fisiologia , Dominica , Flores/anatomia & histologia , Flores/fisiologia , Umidade , Insetos/fisiologia , Néctar de Plantas/fisiologia , Rubiaceae/anatomia & histologia , TemperaturaRESUMO
Despite two centuries of effort in characterizing environmental gradients of species richness in search of universal patterns, surprisingly few of these patterns have been widely acknowledged. Species richness along altitudinal gradients was previously assumed to increase universally from cool highlands to warm lowlands, mirroring the latitudinal increase in species richness from cool to warm latitudes. However, since the more recent general acceptance of altitudinal gradients as model templates for testing hypotheses behind large-scale patterns of diversity, these gradients have been used in support of all the main diversity hypotheses, although little consensus has been achieved. Here we show that when resampling a data set comprising 400,000 records for 3,046 Pyrenean floristic species at different scales of analysis (achieved by varying grain size and the extent of the gradients sampled), the derived species richness pattern changed progressively from hump-shaped to a monotonic pattern as the scale of extent diminished. Scale effects alone gave rise to as many conflicting patterns of species richness as had previously been reported in the literature, and scale effects lent significantly different statistical support to competing diversity hypotheses. Effects of scale on current studies may be affected by human activities, because montane ecosystems and human activities are intimately connected. This interdependence has led to a global reduction in natural lowland habitats, hampering our ability to detect universal patterns and impeding the search for universal diversity gradients to discover the mechanisms determining the distribution of biological diversity on Earth.
Assuntos
Altitude , Biodiversidade , Atividades Humanas , Simulação por Computador , Costa Rica , Modelos Biológicos , Software , Espanha , Árvores/fisiologia , Clima TropicalRESUMO
The search for a common cause of species richness gradients has spawned more than 100 explanatory hypotheses in just the past two decades. Despite recent conceptual advances, further refinement of the most plausible models has been stifled by the difficulty of compiling high-resolution databases at continental scales. We used a database of the geographic ranges of 2,869 species of birds breeding in South America (nearly a third of the world's living avian species) to explore the influence of climate, quadrat area, ecosystem diversity, and topography on species richness gradients at 10 spatial scales (quadrat area, approximately 12,300 to approximately 1,225,000 km(2)). Topography, precipitation, topography x latitude, ecosystem diversity, and cloud cover emerged as the most important predictors of regional variability of species richness in regression models incorporating 16 independent variables, although ranking of variables depended on spatial scale. Direct measures of ambient energy such as mean and maximum temperature were of ancillary importance. Species richness values for 1 degrees x 1 degrees latitude-longitude quadrats in the Andes (peaking at 845 species) were approximately 30-250% greater than those recorded at equivalent latitudes in the central Amazon basin. These findings reflect the extraordinary abundance of species associated with humid montane regions at equatorial latitudes and the importance of orography in avian speciation. In a broader context, our data reinforce the hypothesis that terrestrial species richness from the equator to the poles is ultimately governed by a synergism between climate and coarse-scale topographic heterogeneity.
Assuntos
Aves , Especificidade da Espécie , Animais , Ecossistema , Modelos Teóricos , América do SulRESUMO
Scale is widely recognized as a fundamental conceptual problem in biology, but the question of whether species-richness patterns vary with scale is often ignored in macro-ecological analyses, despite the increasing application of such data in international conservation programmes. We tested for scaling effects in species-richness gradients with spatially scaled data for 241 species of South American hummingbirds (Trochilidae). Analyses revealed that scale matters above and beyond the effect of quadrat area. Species richness was positively correlated with latitude and topographical relief at ten different spatial scales spanning two orders of magnitude (ca. 12,300 to ca. 1,225,000 km2). Surprisingly, when the influence of topography was removed, the conditional variation in species richness explained by latitude fell precipitously to insignificance at coarser spatial scales. The perception of macro-ecological pattern thus depends directly upon the scale of analysis. Although our results suggest there is no single correct scale for macro-ecological analyses, the averaging effect of quadrat sampling at coarser geographical scales obscures the fine structure of species-richness gradients and localized richness peaks, decreasing the power of statistical tests to discriminate the causal agents of regional richness gradients. Ideally, the scale of analysis should be varied systematically to provide the optimal resolution of macro-ecological pattern.