INVESTIGADORES
VAZQUEZ Diego P.
artículos
Título:
Rareness and specialization in plant-pollinator networks
Autor/es:
DORADO, J.; VÁZQUEZ, D. P.; STEVANI, E. L.; CHACOFF, N. P.
Revista:
ECOLOGY
Editorial:
ECOLOGICAL SOC AMER
Referencias:
Lugar: Washington; Año: 2011 vol. 92 p. 19 - 25
ISSN:
0012-9658
Resumen:
Most rare species appear to be specialists in plantpollinator
networks. This observation could result either from real ecological
processes or from sampling artifacts. Several methods have been proposed
to overcome these artifacts, but they have the limitation of being
based on visitation data, causing interactions involving rare visitor
species to remain undersampled. We propose the analysis of food
composition in bee trap nests to assess the reliability of network
specialization estimates. We compared data from a plantpollinator
network in the Monte Desert of Villavicencio Nature Reserve, Argentina,
sampled by visit observation, and data from trap nests sampled at the
same time and location. Our study shows that trap nest sampling was good
for estimating rare species degree. The rare species in the networks
appear to be more specialized than they really are, and the bias in the
estimation of the species degree increases with the rareness. The low
species degree of these rare species in the visitation networks results
from insufficient sampling of the rare interactions, which could have
important consequences for network structure.