Pollination in the campo rupestre: a test of hypothesis for an ancient tropical mountain vegetation

Author(s)

Monteiro, Beatriz Lopes ^[1] ; Gutierrez Camargo, Maria Gabriela ^[1] ; Loiola, Priscilla De Paula ^[1] ; Carstensen, Daniel Wisbech ^[2] ; Gustafsson, Simone ^[2] ; Cerdeira Morellato, Leonor Patricia ^[1]

Affiliation

^[1] Sao Paulo State Univ, Biosci Inst, Dept Biodivers, UNESP, Phenol Lab, BR-13509900 Sao Paulo - Brazil

^[2] Univ Copenhagen, Ctr Macroecol Evolut & Climate, Globe Inst, DK-2100 Copenhagen - Denmark

• Document type: Review article
• Source: Biological Journal of the Linnean Society; v. 133, n. 2, p. 512-530, JUN 2021.
• Web of Science Citations: 2

Abstract

The campo rupestre is a Neotropical OCBIL (old, climatically buffered infertile landscape), a grassy-shrub vegetation with high species richness and endemism, characterized by rocky outcrops surrounded by grasslands distributed in South American ancient mountaintops. We tested one OCBIL prediction: the prevalence of long-distance pollinators ensuring cross-pollination across the archipelago-like landscapes of the campo rupestre. We described the pollination systems and tested whether their frequency differed across vegetation types and elevation, focusing on long-distance systems. We performed non-systematic and systematic surveys of plants and plant-pollinator interactions across the elevation gradient and vegetation types. We also reviewed the literature on campo rupestre pollination and applied an accuracy criterion to infer 11 pollination systems. The bee system was split into large bee (long-distance) and small bee (shorter distances) to test the prevalence of long-distance pollination systems. We surveyed 413 pollinator species, mostly bees (220) and flies (69). Among the 636 plant species studied, the bee pollination system was dominant (56%), followed by wind and hummingbird. Wind, small-bee and fly pollination systems increased with elevation, and small-bee and wind pollination systems prevailed in grasslands. Large-bee and hummingbird long-distance pollination systems remained unchanged with elevation and were more frequent in the highly isolated rocky outcrops corroborating the OCBIL theory. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 10/51307-0 - Floristic diversity and seasonal patterns of rupestrian fields and cerrado
• Grantee: Leonor Patricia Cerdeira Morellato
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Research Partnership for Technological Innovation - PITE
• FAPESP's process: 15/10754-8 - Spatio-temporal variations in the flower-color spectra according to the pollinators' visual systems
• Grantee: Maria Gabriela Gutierrez de Camargo
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• FAPESP's process: 18/21646-0 - Ecological relationships in time and space: flower signal standardization in congeneric species
• Grantee: Maria Gabriela Gutierrez de Camargo
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• FAPESP's process: 13/50155-0 - Combining new technologies to monitor phenology from leaves to ecosystems
• Grantee: Leonor Patricia Cerdeira Morellato
• Support Opportunities: Research Program on Global Climate Change - University-Industry Cooperative Research (PITE)
• FAPESP's process: 09/54208-6 - Multi-User Centralized Laboratory at the São Paulo State University Center for Biodiversity Studies
• Grantee: Célio Fernando Baptista Haddad
• Support Opportunities: Multi-user Equipment Program