Insect decline in Brazil: an appraisal of current evidence.

Recent reviews of data on worldwide insect decline include almost no information on Brazil. We gathered evidence from literature searches and a survey sent to researchers, to which 96 replied and 56 provided information and publications. We present 75 instances of trends recorded over an average span of 11 years for aquatic and 22 years for terrestrial insects. These include time-replicated samples and expert opinion based on long-term local collections. Most terrestrial data are for butterflies, bees and scarab beetles. Aquatic studies include several insect orders, usually sorted to genus or family. Terrestrial insects showed significantly more cases of declines than increases, both in abundance (17 : 3) and in diversity (11 : 1). In aquatic cases, no tendency was detected in abundance (2 : 2) or diversity (3 : 4), not counting cases with no trend. Differences in these results among habitats may be due to the shorter span and less change in environmental conditions in the aquatic surveys, which included sites already degraded before sampling. We offer guidelines for future long-term assessments, including resampling of legacy collection sites.

Areas Requiring Restoration Efforts are a Complementary Opportunity to Support the Demand for Pollination Services in Brazil.

Crop pollination is one of Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) that reconciles biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. NCP benefits vary across space, including among distinct political-administrative levels within nations. Moreover, initiatives to restore ecosystems may enhance NCP provision, such as crop pollination delivered by native pollinators. We mapped crop pollination demand (PD), diversity of pollinator-dependent crops, and vegetation deficit (VD) (vis-a-vis Brazilian legal requirements) across all 5570 municipalities in Brazil. Pollinator-dependent crops represented ∼55% of the annual monetary value of agricultural production and ∼15% of the annual crop production. Municipalities with greater crop PD (i.e., higher degree of pollinator dependence of crop production) also had greater VD, associated with large properties and monocultures. In contrast, municipalities with a greater diversity of pollinator-dependent crops and predominantly small properties presented a smaller VD. Our results support that ecological restoration prompted by legal requirements offers great potential to promote crop productivity in larger properties. Moreover, conservation of vegetation remnants could support food security in small properties. We provided the first steps to identify spatial patterns linking biodiversity conservation and pollination service. Using Brazilian legal requirements as an example, we show that land-use management policies may be successfully used to ensure agricultural sustainability and crop production.

The diversity and evolution of pollination systems in large plant clades: Apocynaceae as a case study.

Background and Aims: Large clades of angiosperms are often characterized by diverse interactions with pollinators, but how these pollination systems are structured phylogenetically and biogeographically is still uncertain for most families. Apocynaceae is a clade of >5300 species with a worldwide distribution. A database representing >10 % of species in the family was used to explore the diversity of pollinators and evolutionary shifts in pollination systems across major clades and regions. Methods: The database was compiled from published and unpublished reports. Plants were categorized into broad pollination systems and then subdivided to include bimodal systems. These were mapped against the five major divisions of the family, and against the smaller clades. Finally, pollination systems were mapped onto a phylogenetic reconstruction that included those species for which sequence data are available, and transition rates between pollination systems were calculated. Key Results: Most Apocynaceae are insect pollinated with few records of bird pollination. Almost three-quarters of species are pollinated by a single higher taxon (e.g. flies or moths); 7 % have bimodal pollination systems, whilst the remaining approx. 20 % are insect generalists. The less phenotypically specialized flowers of the Rauvolfioids are pollinated by a more restricted set of pollinators than are more complex flowers within the Apocynoids + Periplocoideae + Secamonoideae + Asclepiadoideae (APSA) clade. Certain combinations of bimodal pollination systems are more common than others. Some pollination systems are missing from particular regions, whilst others are over-represented. Conclusions: Within Apocynaceae, interactions with pollinators are highly structured both phylogenetically and biogeographically. Variation in transition rates between pollination systems suggest constraints on their evolution, whereas regional differences point to environmental effects such as filtering of certain pollinators from habitats. This is the most extensive analysis of its type so far attempted and gives important insights into the diversity and evolution of pollination systems in large clades.

Integrating public engagement to intensify pollination services through ecological restoration.

Globally, human activities impose threats to nature and the provision of ecosystem services, such as pollination. In this context, ecological restoration provides opportunities to create managed landscapes that maximize biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture, e.g., via provision of pollination services. Managing pollination services and restoration opportunities requires the engagement of distinct stakeholders embedded in diverse social institutions. Nevertheless, frameworks toward sustainable agriculture often overlook how stakeholders interact and access power in social arenas. We present a perspective integrating pollination services, ecological restoration, and public engagement for biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. We highlight the importance of a comprehensive assessment of pollination services, restoration opportunities identification, and a public engagement strategy anchored in institutional analysis of the social arenas involved in restoration efforts. Our perspective can therefore guide the implementation of practices from local to country scales to enhance biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture.

Data standardization of plant-pollinator interactions.

BACKGROUND: Animal pollination is an important ecosystem function and service, ensuring both the integrity of natural systems and human well-being. Although many knowledge shortfalls remain, some high-quality data sets on biological interactions are now available. The development and adoption of standards for biodiversity data and metadata has promoted great advances in biological data sharing and aggregation, supporting large-scale studies and science-based public policies. However, these standards are currently not suitable to fully support interaction data sharing. RESULTS: Here we present a vocabulary of terms and a data model for sharing plant-pollinator interactions data based on the Darwin Core standard. The vocabulary introduces 48 new terms targeting several aspects of plant-pollinator interactions and can be used to capture information from different approaches and scales. Additionally, we provide solutions for data serialization using RDF, XML, and DwC-Archives and recommendations of existing controlled vocabularies for some of the terms. Our contribution supports open access to standardized data on plant-pollinator interactions. CONCLUSIONS: The adoption of the vocabulary would facilitate data sharing to support studies ranging from the spatial and temporal distribution of interactions to the taxonomic, phenological, functional, and phylogenetic aspects of plant-pollinator interactions. We expect to fill data and knowledge gaps, thus further enabling scientific research on the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator communities, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and the development of public policies. The proposed data model is flexible and can be adapted for sharing other types of interactions data by developing discipline-specific vocabularies of terms.

ATLANTIC POLLINATION: a data set of flowers and interaction with nectar-feeding vertebrates from the Atlantic Forest.

Flowering plant species and their nectar-feeding vertebrates exemplify some of the most remarkable biotic interactions in the Neotropics. In the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, several species of birds (especially hummingbirds), bats, and non-flying mammals, as well as one lizard feed on nectar, often act as pollinators and contribute to seed output of flowering plants. We present a dataset containing information on flowering plants visited by nectar-feeding vertebrates and sampled at 166 localities in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. This dataset provides information on 1902 unique interactions among 515 species of flowering plants and 129 species of potential vertebrate pollinators and the patterns of species diversity across latitudes. All plant-vertebrate interactions compiled were recorded through direct observations of visits, and no inferences of pollinators based on floral syndromes were included. We also provide information on the most common plant traits used to understand the interactions between flowers and nectar-feeding vertebrates: plant growth form, corolla length, rate of nectar production per hour in bagged flowers, nectar concentration, flower color and shape, time of anthesis, presence or absence of perceptible fragrance by human, and flowering phenology as well as the plant's threat status by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classification. For the vertebrates, status of threat by IUCN classification, body mass, bill or rostrum size are provided. Information on the frequency of visits and pollen deposition on the vertebrate's body is provided from the original source when available. The highest number of unique interactions is recorded for birds (1771) followed by bats (110). For plants, Bromeliaceae contains the highest number of unique interactions (606), followed by Fabaceae (242) and Gesneriaceae (104). It is evident that there was geographical bias of the studies throughout the southeast of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and that most effort was directed to flower-hummingbird interactions. However, it reflects a worldwide tendency of more plants interacting with birds compared with other vertebrate species. The lack of similar protocols among studies to collect basic data limits the comparisons among areas and generalizations. Nevertheless, this dataset represents a notable effort to organize and highlight the importance of vertebrate pollinators in this hotspot of biodiversity on Earth and represents the data currently available. No copyright or proprietary restrictions are associated with the use of this data set. Please cite this data paper when the data are used in publications or scientific events.

Nectar production dynamics and sugar composition in two Mucuna species (Leguminosae, Faboideae) with different specialized pollinators.

Nectar is secreted in particular rhythms throughout the lifespan of a flower, which allows determining the nectar production dynamics. This paper compares nectar features in Mucuna japira and Mucuna urens describing: dynamics of nectar production, floral response to nectar removal, resorption, nectar sugar composition, and variation in nectar sugar composition. M. japira inflorescence bears 12-21 yellow flowers, which are in anthesis for 7 days, whereas M. urens inflorescence bears 36-54 greenish flowers, but only 1-3 flowers are in anthesis simultaneously that last one night. Nectar volume and sugar concentration were measured, and the amount of sugar was estimated. Qualitative and quantitative nectar sugar composition was determined. Both species had a constant nectar sugar concentration (ca. 10% for M. japira and ca. 16% for M. urens) and secreted high volumes of nectar (ca. 340 µl per flower for M. japira and 310 µl per flower for M. urens), during 5 days for M. japira and 6 h for M. urens, but after the first removal, i.e., when flower opening mechanism is triggered, nectar production stops immediately. Nectar resorption occurred in both species. Nectar sugar composition showed some similarities between the species. Variation in nectar sugar composition occurred in both species. The Mucuna species are dependent on their pollinators to produce fruits and seeds, and they have different strategies to promote the necessary interaction with birds or bats, especially related to nectar and flower characteristics.

Pollinator Efficacy in Yellow Passion Fruit (Passiflora edulis f. flavicarpa Deg., Passifloraceae).

A pollinator's efficacy is the result obtained from a single visit by a species and is often used to measure the importance of different species of floral visitors as pollinators. Therefore, this study aimed to measure the efficacy of fruit and seed set in Passiflora edulis f. flavicarpa Deg. (Passifloraceae) by manual cross-pollination, natural pollination and by Xylocopa (Neoxylocopa) frontalis (Olivier 1789), performed through a single and two visits, to evaluate if there is occurrence of pollen limitation and pollinators' limitation in the studied crop fields. Four different treatments were performed: (1) manual cross-pollination (n = 37 flowers); (2) natural pollination (n = 52 flowers); (3) pollination by a single visit of X. frontalis (n = 41 flowers); and (4) pollination by two visits of X. frontalis (n = 31 flowers). We verified that fruit set occurred in all the treatments performed. Fruit set rate by manual cross-pollination was significantly higher than that obtained under natural conditions indicating the occurrence of pollen limitation and pollinators' limitation under natural pollination. Regarding the number of seeds, analysis of variance (ANOVA) did not indicate a significant difference between the mean seed set for the different types of pollination evaluated. The management of occupied nests, the introduction of trap-nests, and the conservation of native vegetation in areas close to the yellow passion fruit crops can increase pollinators' population. The greater richness and abundance of pollinators are essential to promote a greater number of fruit and seed set in the yellow passion fruit crops.

The contribution of the BIOTA/FAPESP Program to the knowledge on pollination and plant reproduction / Contribuição do Programa BIOTA/FAPESP para o conhecimento sobre polinização e reprodução em plantas

Abstract Interactions between plant and pollinators are associated with the origin and maintenance of species diversity, as well as ecosystem functioning. The potential of pollination as an ecosystem service is evidenced by its association with food production. Understanding pollination at the landscape scale is essential for characterizing the pollination service for several crops that depend on pollinators for fruit and seed set that make up the human diet. Our aim was to carry out a literature review of studies and projects funded by BIOTA/FAPESP to illustrate the main research approaches developed in the field of Pollination Biology, especially related to plant-pollinator interactions. Plant-pollinator interactions in the Atlantic forest were leveraged as a result of this long-term research program, during which several papers were published in international journals. Pollination by bees (melittophily) was the most representative pollination system studied. In addition to melittophily, other interactions were studied such as pollination by hawkmoths (sphingophily), by hummingbirds (ornithophily) and by bats (chiropterophily). The specific mutualistic relationships between fig trees and fig wasps were also subject of studies within the Program. At the beginning of the BIOTA/FAPESP Program, there were many gaps in basic information about pollination and breeding systems of Brazilian native plant species. Thus, the Program was fundamental to fuel research on the natural history of plants and pollinators from the Atlantic forest. Overall, the Program funded studies that investigated themes such as functional pollination ecology, pollinator effectiveness, plant population genetics, structure and dynamics of plant-pollinator interaction networks, as well as geographic distribution and macroevolution of pollination systems, as well as genetic and molecular studies of native plant populations focusing on pollen flow and genetic structure of populations. Additionally, studies on pollination in the context of landscape ecology had the aim of assessing the effects of forest fragmentation on the functioning of plant populations and their interactions with pollinators and the relationships between landscape structure and ecological processes, biodiversity, and ecosystem service. Therefore, the Program had a prominent role in producing basic data with great implications for understanding the ecology and promoting the conservation of plant-pollinator interactions.

Resumo A interação planta-polinizador está associada à origem e manutenção da diversidade de espécies de plantas e ao funcionamento dos ecossistemas. O potencial da polinização como serviço ecossistêmico é destacado quando associado à produção de alimentos. Compreender esta interação na escala da paisagem é essencial para caracterizar o serviço de polinização para muitos cultivos que dependem dos polinizadores para a formação de frutos e sementes que integram a dieta humana. O objetivo deste trabalho foi realizar uma revisão bibliográfica de estudos e projetos financiados pelo BIOTA/FAPESP para ilustrar as principais abordagens de pesquisa desenvolvidas no campo da Biologia da Polinização, especialmente relacionadas à interação planta-polinizador. As interações planta-polinizador na Mata Atlântica foram alavancadas como resultado desse programa de pesquisa de longo prazo, durante o qual vários artigos foram publicados em revistas internacionais. A polinização por abelhas (melitofilia) foi o sistema de polinização mais representativo estudado. Além da melitofilia, outras interações foram estudadas, como a polinização por mariposas (esfingofilia), por beija-flores (ornitofilia) e por morcegos (quiropterofilia). As relações mutualísticas específicas entre figueiras e vespas do figo também foram objeto de estudos no âmbito do Programa. No início do Programa BIOTA/FAPESP, havia muitas lacunas sobre informações básicas sobre polinização e sistemas de reprodução de espécies vegetais nativas brasileiras. Assim, o Programa foi fundamental para desenvolver pesquisas sobre a história natural de plantas e polinizadores da Mata Atlântica. No geral, o Programa financiou estudos que investigaram temas como ecologia funcional da polinização, eficácia de polinizadores, genética de populações de plantas, estrutura e dinâmica de redes de interação planta-polinizador, bem como distribuição geográfica e macroevolução dos sistemas de polinização, além de estudos genéticos e moleculares de populações de plantas nativas com foco no fluxo de pólen. Adicionalmente, estudos sobre polinização no contexto da ecologia da paisagem tiveram como objetivo avaliar os efeitos da fragmentação florestal no funcionamento das populações de plantas e suas interações com os polinizadores e as relações entre a estrutura da paisagem e os processos ecológicos, biodiversidade e serviços ecossistêmicos. Portanto, o Programa teve um papel de destaque na produção de dados básicos com grandes implicações para o entendimento da ecologia e promoção da conservação das interações planta-polinizador.