Ecology

Introduction

This paper aims to find out the effect of canopy cover on pollination. Wild seed species in canopy cover are an important world resource for the products and ecosystem services they provide, including medicine, food, nutrient cycling, and alternative resources for pollinators of domesticated crops. Maintaining seed biodiversity in canopy cover is a critical challenge for conservation biologists because individual species may have reduced mean fitness in species-rich communities because of increased interspecific competition. In seeding seeds, the presence of coseeding species can reduce pollination success at a local scale because of reduced visitation of generalist pollinators to the focal species, decreased delivery of conspecific pollen, or stigma interference by heterospecific pollen. However, whether the number of competing species within broad geographic regions influences global patterns in pollination biology has not yet been examined.

Adaptations for effective pollination are widely accepted to have contributed to the tremendous radiation of angiosperms. Pollen limitation may decrease as seeds evolve traits that reduce reliance on pollinators (e.g., self-compatible breeding systems and vegetative reproduction), attract more specialized pollinators that deliver less heterospecific pollen, or reduce competition for pollinators (e.g., shifts in seeding time). Studies have found that diversity in seeding phenologies and pollinator fauna is indeed higher in species-rich areas. If seeds in species-rich regions are more often pollen limited than those in species-depauperate areas, they may experience relatively strong natural selection favoring traits that reduce pollen limitation, making current biodiversity canopy cover an even more valuable global resource as centers for future adaptation and, potentially, speciation.

A strong positive relationship between canopy cover and pollen limitation may imply that the number and identity of a seed species' neighbors determines the direction and intensity of selection on many attributes of seed species and seed-animal relationships such as floral specialization, floral phenology, breeding systems, and demography. Such global patterns in pollination success are interesting in their own right, but species richness is undoubtedly confounded by several factors that make it difficult to identify the primary cause of increased pollen limitation. First, it is possible that seed traits that confer higher magnitudes of pollen limitation are more prevalent in species-rich regions (e.g., if self-incompatible species experience greater pollen limitation and also disproportionately occupy species-rich areas). Second, a few well studied clades in species-rich regions (e.g., tropical Orchidaceae) may bias the apparent relationship between pollen limitation and regional species richness. Although some species' attributes, such as presence in forested or open habitats, may not be phenotypic in the conventional sense, related species may still be more similar in these traits, and using each of these related species as an independent data point in nonphylogenetic (or cross-species) analyses is a form of pseudoreplication.

Results

Following variables were used in determining the effect of canopy cover on pollination.

Ppods= ”proportion of pods” = #pods/(pods+buds+male & female flowers) [This was counted in the field - a high proportion of pods should indicate that most of the flowers bloomed quite some time ago and are now setting fruit

Pcover= (the % of the 96 mirror squares that ...