DOI: 10.5061/dryad.stqjq2cbx
title: Flowering plant communities mediate the effects of habitat composition and configuration on wild pollinator communities

description: There is strong evidence that landscape-scale factors such as habitat
 diversity, composition, and configuration are important drivers of
 declines in pollinators and pollination services. However, context and
 species-specific responses make it challenging to draw general conclusions
 about the most important components of landscapes that support diverse and
 abundant pollinator communities. In this study, we took a functional
 traits approach to community assembly and tested the hypothesis that
 landscape properties act most strongly on pollinators indirectly, through
 their influence on flowering plant communities. Using plant and pollinator
 data from 96 landscapes in Britain, we tested the associations between
 plant and pollinator communities and local environmental factors, such as
 habitat cover and configuration, using path analysis based on Mantel and
 partial Mantel statistics. When all pollinators were considered, we found
 that the environmental factors had stronger links to the composition of
 flowering plant communities than to the composition of pollinator
 communities. Further, the flowering plant community was strongly linked to
 the pollinator community suggesting a mediating role between land use and
 pollinators. When separating the pollinator community into taxonomic
 groups, we found the same result for hoverflies, but wild bees were linked
 to both environmental factors and flowering plants. We further explored
 these links with structural equation models using the response-effect
 trait framework as a guiding principle. We found strong evidence that land
 use composition and configuration influence the trait distribution and
 functional diversity of the pollinator community via plant community
 composition. These findings suggest that the indirect effect of land use
 on pollinators via flowering plants should be considered in informing the
 design of pollinator-friendly landscapes and in future research on the
 effects of land use and management on wild pollinators.
description: # Flowering plant communities mediate the effects of habitat composition
 and configuration on wild pollinator communities
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2cbx](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2cbx) ## Description of the data and file structure This dataset contains three matrices and two metadata tables. The pollinator matrix is a site x species table of pollinators caught by pan trapping during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The abundance values are pooled from 3 trapping sessions each year. The plant matrix is a site x species table of flowering plants recorded from transects during the same summers. Abundance data are the pooled number of "floral units" (e.g., single flowers, capitula, etc.) from 3 transect recording sessions each year. The Env_matrix sheet provides all the environmental data recorded from each site (corresponding to a 2x2km grid square) that was used in the paper. The metadata sheet describes the headings for the environmental data. The species abbreviations sheet provides the species list corresponding to the plant and pollinator matrices. ### Files and variables #### File: Gillespie\_et\_al.\_2024\_Functional\_Ecology\_Data.xlsx **Description:** An excel file containing plant and pollinator site x species matrices and the environmental data matrix ##### Variables * All variables are defined in the metadata and Species Abbreviations sheets ## Code/software MS Excel ## Access information NA