TY - JOUR T1 - Floral resource-landscapes and pollinator-mediated interactions in plant communities JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/022533 SP - 022533 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 Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/16/022533.abstract N2 - 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. ER -