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P-IE

Student Competition Poster

Category: Student Competition Poster

Undergrad Poster: P-IE, Ecology

Contrasting response of native and non-native pollinators to urban floral design elements

Presenting Author(s)

Sydney J. Ribera

Mission, TX, USA

Co-Author(s)

Shalene Jha

Associate Professor
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas, United States
HB

Heather Bass

Botanical Research Institute of Texas
Fort Worth, Texas, United States
KB

Keri Barfield

Botanical Research Institute of Texas
Fort Worth, Texas, United States
TP

Tim Pannkuk

Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, Texas, United States
AB

Amy Belaire

The Nature Conservancy
Austin, Texas, United States
HV

Heather Venhaus

Regenerative Environmental Design
Austin, Texas, United States

Recent research has revealed that urban green-spaces have the potential to support substantial levels of native biodiversity, which can provide valuable ecosystem function. These urban green spaces are often designed to optimize distinct conservation goals, such as enhanced plant species richness or increased resilience to drought; despite this fact, it is not clear how distinct urban design priorities impact biodiversity and function within these developed landscapes. This is especially true for native and non-native insect pollinators, which play a critical role in wild and crop plant reproduction, and which are sensitive to local vegetation composition and flowering phenology. Further, successful pollination depends not only on the presence of pollinators, but their composition, visitation rates, and visitation duration. In this study, we leverage a ‘designed experiment’ approach to evaluate the impacts of common urban design practices on pollinator composition and visitation patterns across 40 urban vegetation plots located in two study regions in Central Texas. We observed a total of 4,840 observations of floral visitors, including a total of 92 Lepidopteran, Dipteran, and Hymenopteran species. We found that pollinator visitation rates, visitation duration, and species richness were significantly predicted by both floral density and diversity, but the strength and direction of the response depended on the season and pollinator taxonomic group. Interestingly, the design treatments that were most optimal for pollinators were also those that required relatively little water for irrigation, indicating that synergies between multiple design priorities – rather than tradeoffs – are possible in urban landscapes.