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Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna
Whereas the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States historically experienced fire primarily during the mid‐summer lightning season, managers today typically apply prescribed fire during the late winter or early spring months. The ecological implications of this discrepancy remain poorly unde...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
John Wiley and Sons Inc.
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10441176/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37608923 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10450 |
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author | Ulyshen, Michael Robertson, Kevin Horn, Scott Dixon, Cinnamon |
author_facet | Ulyshen, Michael Robertson, Kevin Horn, Scott Dixon, Cinnamon |
author_sort | Ulyshen, Michael |
collection | PubMed |
description | Whereas the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States historically experienced fire primarily during the mid‐summer lightning season, managers today typically apply prescribed fire during the late winter or early spring months. The ecological implications of this discrepancy remain poorly understood, especially with regard to pollinators and their interactions with flowers. In a replicated field experiment, we compared the abundance and richness of bees and bee–flower interactions among pine savanna plots in Florida that were burned either during the winter, spring, summer, or fall. We netted 92 bee species from 77 species of flowers, representing 435 unique bee–flower interactions in total. When analyzing the results from each month separately, we detected significant short‐term reductions in the number of bees and bee–flower interactions following fires regardless of season. Although bee abundance and richness did not differ over the entire season, bee–flower interaction richness was significantly higher overall in spring and summer plots than in fall plots and the composition of both bees and bee–flower interactions differed significantly among treatments. Several bee–flower interactions were significantly associated with one or more of the treatments. Some of these associations could be attributed to differences in flowering phenology among treatments. Taken together, our findings suggest that season of fire has modest but potentially important implications for interactions between bees and flowers in southeastern pine ecosystems. Because most flowering plants within our study region are pollinated by a variety of bees and other insects, and most bees endemic to the region are polylectic, season of fire may not be very important to either group overall. However, the timing of fire may be more important to particular species including certain flower specialists and fire‐sensitive taxa such as butterflies. Future research targeting such species would be of interest. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10441176 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-104411762023-08-22 Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna Ulyshen, Michael Robertson, Kevin Horn, Scott Dixon, Cinnamon Ecol Evol Research Articles Whereas the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States historically experienced fire primarily during the mid‐summer lightning season, managers today typically apply prescribed fire during the late winter or early spring months. The ecological implications of this discrepancy remain poorly understood, especially with regard to pollinators and their interactions with flowers. In a replicated field experiment, we compared the abundance and richness of bees and bee–flower interactions among pine savanna plots in Florida that were burned either during the winter, spring, summer, or fall. We netted 92 bee species from 77 species of flowers, representing 435 unique bee–flower interactions in total. When analyzing the results from each month separately, we detected significant short‐term reductions in the number of bees and bee–flower interactions following fires regardless of season. Although bee abundance and richness did not differ over the entire season, bee–flower interaction richness was significantly higher overall in spring and summer plots than in fall plots and the composition of both bees and bee–flower interactions differed significantly among treatments. Several bee–flower interactions were significantly associated with one or more of the treatments. Some of these associations could be attributed to differences in flowering phenology among treatments. Taken together, our findings suggest that season of fire has modest but potentially important implications for interactions between bees and flowers in southeastern pine ecosystems. Because most flowering plants within our study region are pollinated by a variety of bees and other insects, and most bees endemic to the region are polylectic, season of fire may not be very important to either group overall. However, the timing of fire may be more important to particular species including certain flower specialists and fire‐sensitive taxa such as butterflies. Future research targeting such species would be of interest. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2023-08-21 /pmc/articles/PMC10441176/ /pubmed/37608923 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10450 Text en Published 2023. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Research Articles Ulyshen, Michael Robertson, Kevin Horn, Scott Dixon, Cinnamon Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna |
title | Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna |
title_full | Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna |
title_fullStr | Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna |
title_full_unstemmed | Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna |
title_short | Effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna |
title_sort | effects of season of fire on bee‐flower interaction diversity in a fire‐maintained pine savanna |
topic | Research Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10441176/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37608923 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10450 |
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