Speaker
Description
Active restoration accelerates the colonization and succession of vegetation communities by using manual methods to introduce plant propagules into a degraded area. To meet the demands for large landscape revegetation, active restoration restricts land practitioners to use plants that are produced by seed suppliers at commercial scales (the ‘Restoration species pool’). Plants from the restoration species pool may therefore become more common across ecological communities as land managers seek to revegetate degraded areas, with unknown consequences for biotic communities in higher trophic levels. For Europe, we surveyed the literature to identify plant genera that are available for restoration, and then used plant-pollinator interaction data from 17 different studies to compare the association between plant commonness and pollinator diversity. We predicted that plants from the restoration species pool would already be common in plant-pollinator interaction networks, and that common plants primarily benefit common and abundant generalist pollinators. Plant genera from the restoration species pool were more common and supported more pollinators, than other plant genera, and only a few genera from the restoration species pool are required to support most of the pollinator species. However, common plants supported pollinator assemblages that were redundant with other co-occurring plants, and contribute little to overall pollinator diversity. Finally, simulated seed mixes of common plant species supported fewer rare pollinators, and more generalists, indicating that active restoration contributes to the functional homogenization of pollinator communities. Increasing the availability plants that support rare, specialized, and unique pollinators can equip land managers to restore ecosystems with taxonomically and functionally diverse communities.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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