Linking bees and flowers: mutualistic interaction networks to study ecosystem functioning

In recent years, much attention is going to pollinators, as they are important for the increasing food production while being threatened by agricultural intensification and other environmental drivers. While honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) are generalist according to their flower preferences, wild pollinators’ flower preferences can go from generalist to very specialist. The same goes for plant species, which can be generalist or specialist in the pollinator species they need to get pollinated. The combination of a set of generalist and specialist plant species with a pollinator community consisting of generalists and specialists in a certain habitat, results in an interaction network between pollinators and the visited plant flowers. Studying this mutualistic interaction network is a time-consuming method, but can provide valuable data to calculate indicators of ecosystem functioning. One of the important conclusions that came already out of studies applying this method is that pollination systems are often more generalized than thought based on pollination syndromes. This poster will explore the method of studying mutualistic interaction networks with a focus on the sampling protocol, the indicators that can be derived from the data and their meaning.