Variation in pollinator-mediated plant reproduction across an urbanization gradient | Semantic Scholar (2024)

The complexity with which urbanization, a green corridor, and pollinator communities can shape the reproductive investment and fitness of native plant populations is demonstrated.

Results support the idea that urbanization could affect flower shapes and partitioning of the total flower shape variation suggests that urbanization affects flower shape through abiotic factors and via its impact on pollinator visitation rates.

This study evaluates herbivory on Turnera subulata, a common weed, along a rural-urban gradient in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, and shows that urban populations had significantly higher Herbivory rates than rural populations.

Analysis of seeds from 52 populations along three urban-to-rural subtransects in the Greater Toronto Area offers preliminary insights into the eco- evolutionary role of green corridors in urban environments and finds significant heritable variation for eight traits within A. syriaca populations.

The study suggests urbanization does not disrupt local adaptation and coevolution among mutualists, with stronger local adaptation for rhizobia than white clover.

Local adaptation was not influenced by urbanization, indicating that while urbanization does influence the ecology of plant-microbe interactions, it does not disrupt local adaptation and coevolution among mutualists.

Significant heritable variation for nine traits within common milkweed populations and weak phenotypic divergence among populations are found, but neither urbanization nor an urban green corridor influenced genetic divergence in individual traits or multivariate phenotype.

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It is concluded that urban areas can be places of high transmission of both pollen and pathogens in relation to pollination, and bumblebees were the most abundant pollinator group visiting experimental flowers.

Modifications of plant-pollinator interactions along an urbanisation gradient based on the study of their morphological relationships show that open flower plant species and their specific flower-visitors are especially sensitive to increasing urbanisation.

The mechanistic pathways through which urban drivers alter plant–pollinator interactions are reviewed, finding that non-native plants are not differently preferred by pollinators relative to native plants, therefore removing the basis for expecting pollinator-mediated competition between native and non- native plants in urban habitats.

The results suggest that urbanization may provide diverse selective forces that could affect the phenotypic variation in floral traits.

Strong evidence of reduced pollinator activities at low densities is found, resulting in reduced pollination and a reduction in seed set from 80 to 20% of ovules fertilized (the Allee effect).

The relative effects of local habitat quality and anthropogenic land use across an agricultural to urban gradient for local plant and flying insect communities and flower visitor interaction networks are investigated to point to potential facilitating effects of diverse urban floral and bee communities for pollination.

Evaluated patterns of phenotypic selection on the floral and resistance traits of Gelsemium sempervirens in urban and non-urban sites suggest that urban landscapes may not result in sweeping differences in phenotypesic selection but rather modest differences for some traits, potentially mediated by species interactions.

It is shown that urban areas can support diverse pollinator assemblages, but that this capacity is strongly affected by local habitat quality, and the unique development histories of different urban areas mean that complementary studies in different cities and urban habitats are required.

Investigation of pollinator-plant interactions in a peri-urban landscape on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, California found that bee visitation was highest in urban and agricultural land use contexts, but in contrast, seed set rates in these human-altered landscapes were lower than in natural sites.

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