<p>Despite the unique biota in alpine and subalpine moorland ecosystems and their importance as providers of various ecosystem services, few studies have explored the effects of local environmental and landscape factors on plant and pollinator communities and their interaction structures in these ecosystems. Here, we disentangled the effects of local environmental and landscape factors on plant and pollinator communities and their interaction structures in subalpine moorland ecosystems in northeastern Japan. We found that the composition of the flowering plant communities did not vary with any local environmental and landscape factors in the studied subalpine moorland ecosystems. In contrast, pollinator community composition changed according to flowering plant community composition and geographic distance but not to site altitude. Although the cool summer temperatures across the study sites favored the predominance of Diptera species, the composition of pollinators varied according to shifts in flowering plant composition. We further showed that the number of plant-pollinator interactions increased with increasing flowering abundance and that both pollinator richness and the number of interactions responded positively to increasing flowering species richness. Our results highlighted that, even in species poor plant communities dominated by a few species, the abundance and diversity of flowering plant species are closely linked with the plant-pollinator network structure.</p>

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Effects of local environmental and landscape factors on plant and pollinator communities and their interaction structures in subalpine moorland ecosystems

  • Natsuki Matsubara,
  • Taiki Tachibana,
  • Naohiro Ishii,
  • Yui Tsuchihashi,
  • Mahoro Tomitaka,
  • Yu Takano,
  • Takehiro Sasaki

摘要

Despite the unique biota in alpine and subalpine moorland ecosystems and their importance as providers of various ecosystem services, few studies have explored the effects of local environmental and landscape factors on plant and pollinator communities and their interaction structures in these ecosystems. Here, we disentangled the effects of local environmental and landscape factors on plant and pollinator communities and their interaction structures in subalpine moorland ecosystems in northeastern Japan. We found that the composition of the flowering plant communities did not vary with any local environmental and landscape factors in the studied subalpine moorland ecosystems. In contrast, pollinator community composition changed according to flowering plant community composition and geographic distance but not to site altitude. Although the cool summer temperatures across the study sites favored the predominance of Diptera species, the composition of pollinators varied according to shifts in flowering plant composition. We further showed that the number of plant-pollinator interactions increased with increasing flowering abundance and that both pollinator richness and the number of interactions responded positively to increasing flowering species richness. Our results highlighted that, even in species poor plant communities dominated by a few species, the abundance and diversity of flowering plant species are closely linked with the plant-pollinator network structure.