The effect of nutrient availability on floral display and pollinator interactions

Abstract

Management and restoration are important in helping the ecosystem recover back to an original form. Native plant species and pollinators are a highlight of ecological restoration. Nitrogen is a nutrient source that most plants use to thrive to grow bigger. In high alpine communities, the soil is nitrogen poor and if given treatment can help make native plant communities grow back. We tested whether adding nitrogen affected floral display and pollination. In this study, the field site location is an area that had been stripped away to bare land to build the billy barr community center in Gothic, Colorado. After the billy barr community was successfully built, the land was bare, so there was a restoration project of bringing back native plants in 2017. There are 24 plots were given treatment of either a control, nitrogen in the form of ammonium nitrate, and carbon in the form of sugar. The experiment focused itself in the summer of 2019, to measure floral display and pollinator interactions with the treatments of the plots. The study consisted of counting how many open flowers were open in the plot, the three native plant species that we focused on was Potentilla pulcherrima, Polemonium foliosissmum, and Linum lewisii (flax). I observed pollinators at each plot; where once a pollinator landed on the plant species that was either Potentilla pulcherrima, Polemonium foliosissmum, or Linum lewisii (flax), it would then be noted and what kind of pollinator. The pollinators that we focused on was the native pollinator species in Gothic, Colorado which consisted of Bombus spp, Osmia, Sweat bees, Mining bees, Bee flies, True fly, Pieridae, Lycaenidae, Swallowtails western tiger, Papilio gothica, Checker spots and Speyeria. These observations took place several times, to have data to test our hypothesis. We found that nitrogen has no effect on floral display and on pollinator visitation. We did find that having a bigger floral display increased pollinator visitation. A recommendation for restoration is to have large flower patches to increase pollinator visitations.

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