Author Correction: Pollinator importance networks illustrate the crucial value of bees in a highly speciose plant community.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Pollinator importance networks illustrate the crucial value of bees in a highly speciose plant community.

Accurate predictions of pollination service delivery require a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between plants and flower visitors. To improve measurements of pollinator performance underlying such predictions, we surveyed visitation frequency, pollinator effectiveness (pollen deposition ability) and pollinator importance (the product of visitation frequency and effectiveness) of flower visitors in a diverse Mediterranean flower meadow. With these data we constructed the largest pollinator importance network to date and compared it with the corresponding visitation network to estimate the specialisation of the community with greater precision.

Constructing more informative plant-pollinator networks: visitation and pollen deposition networks in a heathland plant community.

Interaction networks are widely used as tools to understand plant-pollinator communities, and to examine potential threats to plant diversity and food security if the ecosystem service provided by pollinating animals declines. However, most networks to date are based on recording visits to flowers, rather than recording clearly defined effective pollination events. Here we provide the first networks that explicitly incorporate measures of pollinator effectiveness (PE) from pollen deposition on stigmas per visit, and pollinator importance (PI) as the product of PE and visit frequency.

Climate change: bees and orchids lose touch.

Spring temperature increases could differentially affect flowering times and pollinator flight periods, leading to asynchrony and reduced pollination. A specialist orchid-bee study combining herbarium, museum and field data shows that bee flight dates are advancing faster than orchid flowering, which could lead to significant future uncoupling.