DOI: 10.5061/dryad.bcc2fqzfg
title: Opposing patterns of altitude-driven pollinator turnover in the tropical and temperate Americas

description: Abiotic factors (e.g., temperature, precipitation) vary markedly along
 elevational gradients and differentially affect major groups of
 pollinators. Ectothermic bees, for example, are impeded in visiting
 flowers by cold and rainy conditions common at high elevations, while
 endothermic hummingbirds may continue foraging under such conditions.
 Despite the possibly far-reaching effects of the abiotic environment on
 plant-pollinator interactions, we know little about how these factors play
 out at broad ecogeographic scales. We address this knowledge gap by
 investigating how pollination systems vary across elevations in 26 plant
 clades from the Americas. Specifically, we explore Cruden’s 1972
 hypothesis that the harsh montane environment drives a turnover from
 insect to vertebrate pollination at higher elevations. We compared the
 elevational distribution and bioclimatic attributes for a total of 2232
 flowering plants and found that Cruden’s hypothesis only holds in the
 tropics. Above 30° N and below 30°S, plants pollinated by vertebrates
 (mostly hummingbirds) tend to occur at lower elevations than those
 pollinated by insects. We posit that this latitudinal transition is due to
 the distribution of moist, forested habitats favored by vertebrate
 pollinators, which are common at high elevations in the tropics but not in
 the temperate Americas.
description: DATASETS alloc_new_220802.csv -
 pruned GBIF occurrences retained after filtering through
 CoordinateCleaner forupload_20220906_formatted -
 median values (elevation, latitude, longitude, climatic variables)
 calculated for each species from alloc_new_220802.csv
 biogeotree.tre - phylogenetic tree extracted from PhyloMaker.R
 with tips matching species in our dataset 
 For details on data processing and filtering, please see the
 Methods section in the associated manuscript. Details on data sources for
 the gbif data can be found here:  https://doi.org/10.15468/dd.7rpshm  
description: # Opposing patterns of altitude-driven pollinator turnover in the tropical
 and temperate Americas https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bcc2fqzfg The data
 provided is the molecular phylogeny (.tre) obtaind from Jin & Qian
 2019, pruned to cover species included in our dataset (932 of the 2232
 taxa). This phylogenetic tree was used to run phylogenetic GLMMs to test
 for the effect of abiotic climatic variables and latitude on the
 distribution of pollination strategies, while accounting for phylogenetic
 non-independence. ### Description of the data and file structure The .tre
 file is a phylogenetic tree pruned from V.Phylomaker (Jin & Qian
 2019; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecog.04434) to only
 contain species that match our list of species with pollinator
 information. ### Sharing/Access information The backbone phylogeny can be
 obtained directly from Jin & Qian 2019,
 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecog.04434 ###
 Code/Software We performed all analyses in R (versio 4.1.1); detailed R
 scripts for the analyses as well as the specific input data required are
 available through Zenodo.