Functional Diversity of Plant-Pollinator Interactions: Importance, Diversity, and Value of Pollination Services

A special issue of Insects (ISSN 2075-4450). This special issue belongs to the section "Insect Molecular Biology and Genomics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 July 2022) | Viewed by 7403

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues, 

Pollination mediates both reproduction and gene flow for most plant species throughout the globe. Understanding how plant–pollinator interactions have evolved and might change in the future is critical to understanding how their associated ecosystem services will be affected, as well as being critical to achieve food security. Bees, and many other pollinators as bats, birds and butterflies, underpin the global food system but their populations are declining due to human activities and climate change. In this context, new tools can provide information relevant to understand the diversity of pollinators and their services, ranging from phylogeography and variation in gene flow across landscapes, to pollinator efficiency and colony-level foraging analyses.

In this Special Issue, we aim to explore the use of new techniques to help our understanding of plant–pollinator interactions covering a broad range of perspectives including but not limited to the following topics:

  • Identification of pollinators and their behavior in a wide range of ecosystems;
  • Flower visitation and gene flow patterns;
  • Economic value of ecosystem services;
  • Genomic approaches for understanding plant-pollinator interactions;
  • Identification of genes and pathways responsible for floral trait variation and pollinator specificity or shifts between closely related species;

Use of DNA barcoding for species-level identifications, detection of foraging patterns and honey diversity.

Dr. Isabel Marques
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • adaptation
  • flower syndromes
  • flower volatiles
  • functional traits
  • gene flow
  • pollen barcoding/genomics
  • plant-pollinator interactions
  • pollination ecology
  • transcriptomic regulation

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 4145 KiB  
Article
Morphological Structure and Distribution of Hairiness on Different Body Parts of Apis mellifera with an Implication on Pollination Biology and a Novel Method to Measure the Hair Length
by Kamal Ahmed Khan and Tengteng Liu
Insects 2022, 13(2), 189; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/insects13020189 - 11 Feb 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4870
Abstract
Bees play a very important role in pollination, especially western honey bees, which contribute upwards of billions of dollars concerning crop pollination. Hairiness plays an important role in pollination success by transporting pollen, and pollen intake, but there is a lack of detailed [...] Read more.
Bees play a very important role in pollination, especially western honey bees, which contribute upwards of billions of dollars concerning crop pollination. Hairiness plays an important role in pollination success by transporting pollen, and pollen intake, but there is a lack of detailed studies on the morphological mechanisms. The hairiness trait is barely discussed in pollinator trait analysis because of the lack of systematic techniques used to measure hairiness. This paper reports a novel method that is used to measure the hair length of different body parts of a western honey bee through a stereomicroscope equipped with live measurement module software. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to update the knowledge regarding the hair structure of a western honey bee. We explained different types of hairs, hair branches, and their distributions on different body parts, which are discussed in detail. A positive correlation was found between hair length and the number of branches on all body parts. Five types of branches were observed, and these branches vary with different body parts. Our study provides sufficient details about the hair morphology of the western honey bee and a new methodology for measuring hair length. This methodology will improve the knowledge about understanding the pollination efficiency of the western honey bee. Full article
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12 pages, 1210 KiB  
Article
Pollination in the Rainforest: Scarce Visitors and Low Effective Pollinators Limit the Fruiting Success of Tropical Orchids
by Hortensia Cabrera Reyes, David Draper and Isabel Marques
Insects 2021, 12(10), 856; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/insects12100856 - 23 Sep 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1879
Abstract
A single plant might be visited by many flower visitors but not all might act as pollinators. Legitimate pollinators might also differ considerably in their efficiency, limiting pollination success. Unsuitable climatic conditions such as rain also affect pollinator activity. However, in the evergreen [...] Read more.
A single plant might be visited by many flower visitors but not all might act as pollinators. Legitimate pollinators might also differ considerably in their efficiency, limiting pollination success. Unsuitable climatic conditions such as rain also affect pollinator activity. However, in the evergreen rainforest there is no prolonged dry season and flowering occurs usually under rain. Here, we explore the dependence on pollinators and the efficiency of flower visitors for the fruiting success of 10 Andean rainforest orchids. All species were self-compatible but strictly pollinator-dependent. Overall, we found low levels of fruit set in control flowers while experimental geitonogamous and cross-pollinations increased fruit set, revealing extensive pollination limitation in all populations. Seed viability dropped considerably after self and geitonogamous pollinations suggesting the possibility of early-acting inbreeding depression. Even though we monitored flower visitors on an extensive survey, few visitors were seen in these species and even fewer acted as legitimate pollinators. Thus, even though orchid pollination might be extremely diversified, these results show that few visitors are pollinating these species, explaining the low levels of fruit set recorded in the area studied. Full article
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