Pollinator functional traits: a global overview of their diversity and their use

Description

Functional traits are increasingly used to understand pollinators’ responses to multivariate global changes. Although this approach depends on identifying and describing potentially important functional traits, there is no comprehensive overview of their use in insect pollinator studies. We address this knowledge gap by systematically identifying and reviewing studies explicitly using functional traits as effect and response traits, focusing on Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, and Diptera. Among the >200 identified studies, bees was the most studied taxon, while studies on Diptera were rare. The most commonly studied traits related to body size and diet. Traits were often taxon-specific, highlighting the difficulty of designing a shared trait framework across taxa. The studies were mainly carried out in an agricultural context in temperate regions. Most studies focused on the consequences of global change, with a particular emphasis on landscape simplification and fragmentation. The use of a wider array of traits, including e.g. physiological and sensory traits, based on hypotheses of mechanistic links with environmental pressures, may increase the value of trait-based approaches. For better understanding of the generalities in trait-global change relationships, current taxonomic, habitat and geographic biases should be counteracted by focusing more on e.g. Diptera, the global South, and forest ecosystems.

Period	2022 Oct 15
Event title	35th Annual Meeting of the Scandinavian Association of Pollination Ecology (SCAPE)
Event type	Conference
Location	Uppsala, SwedenShow on map