PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Henning Nottebrock
AU  - Baptiste Schmid
AU  - Katharina Mayer
AU  - Céline Devaux
AU  - Karen J. Esler
AU  - Böhning-Gaese Katrin
AU  - Matthias Schleuning
AU  - Jörn Pagel
AU  - Frank M. Schurr
TI  - Floral resource-landscapes and pollinator-mediated interactions in plant communities
AID  - 10.1101/022533
DP  - 2015 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 022533
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/16/022533.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/16/022533.full
AB  - Plant communities provide floral resource-landscapes for pollinators. Yet, it is insufficiently understood how these landscapes shape pollinator-mediated interactions among multiple plant species. Here, we study how pollinators and the seed set of plants respond to the distribution of a floral resource (nectar sugar) in space and across plant species, inflorescences and flowering phenologies. In a global biodiversity hotspot, we quantified floral resource-landscapes on 27 sites of 4 ha comprising 127,993 shrubs of 19 species. Visitation rates of key bird pollinators strongly depended on the phenology of site-scale resource amounts. Seed set of focal plants increased with resources of conspecific neighbours and with site-scale resources, notably with heterospecific resources of lower quality (less sugar per inflorescence). Floral resources are thus a common currency determining how multiple plant species interact via pollinators. These interactions may alter conditions for species coexistence in plant communities and cause community-level Allee effects that promote extinction cascades.