Plant-Pollinator Interactions in Yavapai County, AZ

 Introduction

Pollinators visit plants seeking nectar and/or pollen. Pollinators include insects (e.g. butterflies, moths, beetles, bees, wasps, flies), bats, and birds. In any geographic region, native and non-native pollinators visit native and non-native plants.

Pollinators may be specialists and/or generalists who visit plants for different reasons. For example, some pollinators specialize on the pollen of certain plant species such that they visit only certain plants to harvest pollen from them. These pollen-seeking specialists may be nectar-seeking generalists to the extent that they indiscriminately harvest nectar from any plant species.

Pollinator-plant interactions are a subject of ongoing study. In North America alone there are more than 3,600 bee species. Ecologists document pollinator-plant interactions to understand which pollinators visit which plant species and why.

Methods

We use iNaturalist—a citizen science computer application—to document our observations of pollinators and plants in the places we visit. We have five years of non-systematic observation data from Yavapai County, AZ that we use for our analysis. We looked at which plant species are most frequently visited by pollinators across different taxa. This will help us better understand which local plant species are popular amongst pollinators.

We annotated five years of pollinator observation records from Yavapai County, AZ with the scientific name of the plant species each pollinator is visiting. Our database includes a total of 265 distinct counts of pollinator-plant interactions (note this is different from the number of observations).

Here is a link to our current plant-pollinator interactions in iNat.

There are some notable issues that exist with our data:

·        We did not systematically collect the data. We did not employ ecological sampling methods, we did not sample data at regular intervals of time, and we did not take measures to ensure we systematically sought observations of pollinators across distinct plant taxa in unbiased ways. Therefore, our dataset contains bias.

·        We are analyzing our dataset for fun. Since the data contain unintentional bias, we do not intend for the results of our analysis to be reliable for landscape or species management decisions.

·        Our data contain blank fields (unknowns) at the level of insect taxon family, genus, and species. Because we cannot fill in the blanks with reliable data, we conduct our analysis at the level of insect taxon (e.g. insect family, genus, or species).

·        Our database’s plant records contain plant taxa information at the level of genus and species.

See this post for more thoughts on the limitations of this type of analysis.

Total insect taxa associated with plant genera

 

Count of distinct insect taxa associated with the top ten plant genera by month

This graph reflects the top ten plant genera ranked according to the counts of distinct insect taxa associated with them. In our database, we have data for many more plant genera than those shown.

The top ten plant genera include Asclepias, Baccharis, Ceanothus, Cirsium, Dalea, Ericameria, Helianthus, Hymenothrix, Machaeranthera, and Opuntia. 

There may be more associations between distinct insect taxa and plant genera during the summer months of June, July, and August but they are not reflected in this graph because we didn’t observe them due to extreme heat and/or monsoon rains.

This project and data analysis were a collaboration between Conor Flynn and Alexandra Permar.