DOI: 10.5061/dryad.w3r228144
title: Multivariate flower phenotype and proboscis length shape specialised pollination niches

description: By analysing multivariate floral traits and the topology of the
 pollination network in a community of coexisting plant species that share
 pollinators, we investigated whether plant-pollinator interactions are
 influenced by multivariate flower phenotype and/or  morphological
 traits. 
description: We used plant-pollinator network topology to objectively
 characterise pollination niches. We built the quantitative
 plant-pollinator interaction matrix assigning to each cell the average
 visitation rate (i.e. number of visited flowers per observation period)
 across observation periods of each pollinator morphospecies (j columns) to
 a given plant species (i rows). We first tested whether the interaction
 network exhibited a nested and/or modular structure.<strong>
 </strong>We detected the main pollinators in each module taking into
 account the individualisation of species with greater importance in the
 network modules recognition.To characterise the overall variation in
 floral phenotype among the 11 vervain species, we constructed a matrix
 containing nine quantitative variables of flower measurements from five
 individuals per species (N=55). The variables included were: floral
 display (number of flowers per inflorescence and inflorescence area),
 flower colour (PC1 and PC2 coefficients of the PCA of the reflectance
 data), flower shape (PC1 and PC2 coefficients of the geometric
 morphometric analysis of corolla shape in frontal view and corolla tube
 length) and nectar reward (nectar volume and amount of sugar per flower).
 Besides, we also tested whether the specialised pollination niches
 recognised by the modularity network analysis were associated with the
 morphological correspondence between flowers and probosces and
 trait-matching.
description: # Multivariate flower phenotype and proboscis length shape specialised
 pollination niches Dataset DOI:
 [10.5061/dryad.w3r228144](10.5061/dryad.w3r228144) ## Description of the
 data and file structure We have submitted: 1) a matrix describing a
 quantitative interaction network between vervain species and their
 pollinators (Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt), 2) a matrix describing
 the multivariate flower phenotype of the vervain species (NMDSVerb.txt),
 3) the mean corolla tube length of the vervain species and the mean
 proboscis length of the pollinator species (TraitMatchingMEan2.txt) and 4)
 the individual corolla tube and proboscis lengths
 (TraitMatchingXpollinatorsXeachcorolla.txt) and 5) R script for running
 all the analyses described in the article
 (Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R). Files 1, 2, 3 and 4 are needed to
 succesfully run the file 5) R script including all the analyses shown in
 the article.  The matrix  (Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt) was built
 by recording animal visits to the flowers of the 11 vervain species
 present in the community once a week for 50 days during two consecutive
 flowering seasons between October 2017 and May 2019. We recorded flower
 visitors during 62.5 observation hours in 375 observation periods of 10
 minutes each. We focused this study on diurnal pollinators, thus we
 observed flower visitors on sunny days between 10:00 am to 05:00 pm. In
 each observation period, we recorded the number of flowers visited per
 insect species and the total number of flowers observed on a given plant
 species. We followed the criterion that visitation was only recorded when
 a flower visitor introduced its mouthpart into the flower tube (*i.e.*
 pollen transfer is favoured by the contact of the animal’s proboscis with
 the anthers and stigma). ## Code/software The script
 (Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R) was running using R software and the
 packages cited below. **Software** R Core Team (2024) R: A language and
 environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical
 Computing, Vienna. Available at: [https://www.R](https://www.R)
 -project.org/. version 4.4.1 **Packages** ‘bipartite’ package v. 2.16
 (Dormann *et al*. 2008) ‘agricolae’ (de Mendiburu & de Mendiburu
 2019)  ‘gplots’ (Warnes *et al*. 2016) pavo 2.2.0 package (Maia *et al*.
 2019) ## Brief description of files included ### `TraitMatchingMEan2.txt`
 Contains average trait-matching values (in mm) between corolla tube length
 and pollinator proboscis length for each plant–pollinator pair. ###
 `Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt` Bipartite network of interactions
 between Verbenaceae species and their pollinators, listing the interacting
 plant and pollinator species. The number of each cell shows the visitation
 rate of a given pollinator species on a given vervain species expressed as
 mean number of visited flower/total number of observed flower per
 observation period. ### `NMDSVerb.txt` Results of the Non-Metric
 Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) analysis based on multivariate floral
 traits. Used to visualise trait similarity among Verbenaceae species.  As
 explained in the main text of the article and in the supplementary
 material the nine variables included describes the multivariate flower
 phenotype of the studied vervain species as follow. Flower color:
 color.xpc1 and color.pc2 (without units, there are the CP1 and CP2 values
 from a Principal component Analyses of the corolla reflectance spectra),
 Flower shape: forma.pc1 and forma.pc2 (without units, there are the CP1
 and CP2 values from a landmark-based geometric morphometric analysis),
 Flower size: long.corola (mean corolla tube length in mm), reward amount:
 cant.nectar (volume of nectar), reward quality: azucar.flor (percentage of
 sugar) and flower display: number of flowers (n.flores) and inflorescence
 area in mm2 (area.inflor). ### `Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R` R script
 used to process the dataset, compute trait-matching metrics, and perform
 NMDS and network analyses. ### `TraitMatchingXpollinatorsXeachcorolla.txt`
 Detailed trait-matching values for individual pollinators (proboscis
 length in mm) across each recorded corolla length (in mm) per plant
 species. This file captures intra-specific variation in trait-matching. ##
 Contact For questions about the dataset or analysis, please contact the
 corresponding author.