Do pollinator and plant diversity vary with microclimate heterogeneity?

Abstract

Montane landscapes are topographically complex and contain a biodiverse community of flora and pollinators. As with many other ecosystems, these subalpine and alpine landscapes are changing with the climate, altering the way these ecosystems regulate. As climates become warmer and drier, microclimates offer pockets of coolness that offset the changing seasons. Microclimates allow for snowpack to last longer in some areas and melt out quicker and others hedging the bets for the survival of plant species. Studying this will give us data as to how plants are adapting to climate change. In order to understand how plant-pollinator diversity is being impacted by the climate we did look at floral community composition and pollinator diversity variation between high and low heterogeneity plots. From this data we hope to see that diversity will increase with higher microclimates. In order to test this we will be sampling for pollinators across different transects as well as doing floral phenology counts. Methods of assessing species richness of pollinators will be the same as they are in the Irwin datasets taking into account their identity and what flowers they visit. From this we can see how pollinator diversity is associated with plants diversity. We learned in our data collection that floral diversity is partial to high heterogeneity transects and that pollinators are responding to floral abundance, not plant diversity. In our efforts to preserve different organisms under climate change, floral abundance is an important metric to keep in mind. Protocols for this data collection came from metadata files for David Inouye’s database on flowering phenology and methods developed by Dr. Becky Irwin for Phenology of subalpine bee and plant communities.

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