Science

Consequences of Pollinator Declines for Plant Populations

Animal pollinators provide essential pollination services to the vast majority of flowering plant species. Critically, however, many pollinator populations across the globe are in decline. Put simply, plants will experience reduced reproduction when there are fewer pollinators around. But reproduction is just one part of the plant life cycle and the question remains: Do changes in pollination translate into population consequences for plants? If the plant is short-lived, then we would expect changes in pollination to have large effects on population dynamics. But when plants are longer-lived, we don’t expect reproduction (and therefore pollination) to have as strong of an effect on population dynamics as would survival and growth. To investigate this issue, we’ve been conducting experimental demography on several subalpine plant species in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. In particular, we are exploring how experimentally manipulated variation in pollination services may influence various parts of the plant life cycle—survival, growth, and reproduction—in hundreds of individually tagged plants over several years. (Iler, CaraDonna, DeLira)