ATLANTIC FLOWER-INVERTEBRATE INTERACTIONS: a dataset of occurrence and frequency of floral visits

BOSCOLO ET AL

ECOLOGY

ECOLOGICAL SOC AMER

Año: 2022

0012-9658

Encounters betweenflowers and invertebrates are key events for thefunctioning of tropical forests. Assessing the structure of networkscomposed by the interactions between those partners enables a better understandingof ecosystem functioning and the effects of environmentalfactors over ecological processes. Gathering such data is, however,costly and time-consuming, especially in the highly diverse tropics. Weaimed to provide a comprehensive repository of the available flowerinvertebrate interactions information for the Atlantic Forest, a SouthAmerican tropical forest domain. Data were obtained from publishedworks and “grey literature”, such as theses and dissertations, as well asself-reports by co-authors. The dataset has ~18 thousand interactionrecords forming 482 networks, each containing from 1 to 1,061interaction links. Each network was sampled for about 200 hours or less,with few exceptions. A total of 650 plant genera within 138 differentfamilies and 39 orders were reported, with the most abundant and richfamilies being Asteraceae, Fabaceae and Rubiaceae. Invertebratesinteracting with these plants were all arthropods from 10 orders, 136families and 606 genera, comprising 2,445 morphotypes (including 999named species). Hymenoptera was the most abundant and diverse orderwith at least six times more records than the second-ranked order(Lepidoptera). The complete dataset network shows Hymenopterainteracting with all plant orders, also depicting Diptera, Lepidoptera,Coleoptera, and Hemiptera as important nodes. Among plants, Asteralesand Fabales had the highest number of interactions. The best sampledenvironment was forest (~8,000 records), followed by pastures andcrops. Savanna, grasslands and urban environments (among others)were also reported, indicating a wide range of approaches dedicated tocollect flower-invertebrate data in the Atlantic Forest domain.Nevertheless, most reported data were from forest understory or lowerstrata, indicating a knowledge gap about flower-invertebrate interactionsat the canopy. Also, access to remote regions is still a limitation,generating sampling bias across the geographical range of the AtlanticForest. Future studies in these continuous and hard to access forestedareas shall bring important new information regarding the interactionsbetween flowers and invertebrates at the Atlantic Forest.