The effect of sampling effort on species richness estimates of flower visitors

Abstract

Estimates of species richness, while useful and common to many subdisciplines of biology, are problematic in their reliance on adequate sampling effort. How much sampling is required for an accurate estimate of species richness, and what levels of sampling will render communities comparable? This study used estimates of species richness of flower visitors to four plant species in the presence and absence of an invasive plant as a case study to explore how much sampling effort is necessary to reach saturated species richness. Visitor species were recorded exhaustively in a single flowering season. Visitors were also tested for the pollen of the focal plant in order to ascertain whether visitor richness accurately measured pollinator richness. Empirical visitor accumulation curves for each plant species showed that even when sampling effort was maintained at a high level, saturated species richness estimates were elusive. Pollen data showed that not all visitor species carried pollen of the flowers that they were collected from, and that the frequency of visitation of a particular visitor species did not predict whether this species was likely to carry pollen. This study, in addition to documenting empirical and exhaustive pollinator taxon sampling curves for four plant species, uses those asymptotic richness counts to test whether visitor species numbers and diversity are affected by the presence of an attractive invasive. It also shows that species counts of flower visitors are not simply equivalent to species counts of pollinators.

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