Effects of Floral Abundance, Pollinator Interactions, and Floral Morphology on Stigmatic Pollen Deposition

Abstract

Pollination is a major driver of plant reproductive success and facilitates the growth of many of our major crops and is a foundation to the diversity of many ecosystems. Understanding the ecology of pollination will help preserve this important ecosystem service and predict the changes that will come with climate change. During pollination a pollinator transfers pollen to the stigma of a plant and the plant’s reproductive success is determined by the receipt of conspecific pollen. Many factors can determine the ratio of conspecific to heterospecific pollen that is deposited on the stigma of an individual plant. The available pollinator community and their level of specialization, flower morphology, and the composition of the floral community all can interact in complex ways to influence the composition of pollen deposition. I hypothesize that in subalpine meadows of the Rocky Mountains the most significant driver of conspecific pollen deposition is relative floral abundance. My results show that both relative interaction abundance and relative floral abundance had insignificant effects on the deposition of conspecific pollen and that flower morphology could be the strongest driver.

Local Knowledge Graph (10 entities)

Related Works

Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.

References (21)

3 in Knowledge Hub, 18 external