Flower visitors of sunflower (Helianthus annuus) and its accompanying vegetation in the Inland Pampa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25260/EA.20.30.2.0.859Keywords:
crop pollination, plant-pollinator network, honeybee, native pollinator, field marginAbstract
The yield, quality and stability of many crops, including sunflower, is increased by the presence of pollinators that mostly nest in and obtain floral resources from fragments of semi-natural habitat present in the landscape. The objectives of the study were 1) to understand the interaction of sunflower with its floral visitors, with focus on the effect of the distance to the plot margin, and 2) to characterize the structure of the plant-pollinator network that includes sunflower, the accompanying vegetation and its floral visitors, in the context of an intensively cropped landscape of the Pampean Region (Gral. Villegas, province of Buenos Aires), where the sunflower crop coexists with the spontaneous vegetation in field margins. Among the main results we highlight, first, that a group of native bees dominated the assemblage of flower visitors; second, that the visitation rate of Apis mellifera to sunflower decayed towards the center of the plot; finally, that the flower resources used by native pollinators are mostly of exotic origin. Furthermore, the network approach used allowed to visualize the importance of the surrounding vegetation in sustaining the pollinator populations of the sunflower crop. In the present context of intensification of agricultural management, with the consequent reduction of cultivation borders and generalized loss of biodiversity in agroecosystems, it is imperative to know better the economic and ecological value that field margins have in supporting pollinators and the beneficial fauna in general.
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