Applying the consumer-resource approach to plant-floral visitor interactions: density-dependent effects, resource quality, and spatiotemporal variation across different levels of biological organization

• Grant number: 24/02640-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: August 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Ecology
• Principal Investigator: Felipe Wanderley de Amorim
• Grantee: Caio Simões Ballarin
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IBB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 21/10639-5 - Center for Research on Biodiversity Dynamics and Climate Change, AP.CEPID

Abstract

Plant-floral visitor relationships can be understood as consumer-resource (C-R) interactions once both trophic levels explore and simultaneously serve as resources for their interacting species. Although primarily applied in the study of agonistic interspecific relationships, predictive models used to understand C-R interactions have recently been expanded to mutualisms between plants and floral visitors, enhancing the understanding of how these relationships fluctuate in space and time due to resource and consumer availability changes. However, as predictive models, they lack empirical support to corroborate or improve the understanding of the processes underlying the configuration and reconfiguration of plant-floral visitor relationships in space and time. In this context, this project aims to examine whether unconsidered functional attributes and ecological processes in current predictive models influence the configuration of the plant-floral visitor interaction network. To this end, the study relies on an exhaustive data sampling of plant-bee interactions in a Cerrado ecosystem to: i) assess whether the availability of floral resources and bees differs at specific times of the day, identifying attributes of these organisms that influence the temporal dynamics of plant-bee interactions; ii) identify the underlying mechanisms of legitimate and illegitimate interactions between plants and floral visitors. This study will focus on the attributes of the interacting species and interaction attributes; iii) examine whether density-dependent effects affect the indirect interactions between spatially close plants sharing legitimate and/or illegitimate floral visitors; iv) investigate whether the diversity of floral resources influences the seasonality of the exotic and invasive bee species, Apis mellifera. This study will also assess whether the presence of this exotic species affects the structure of the plant-bee interaction network. By identifying timely and influential variables in plant-floral visitor interaction, the project aims to enhance the predictive power of probabilistic models to predict interactions between plants and floral visitors.