This repository contains the complete data analysis code for the research paper: "Farm complexity determines interaction β-diversity in crop-pollinator networks in polyculture smallholder farms."
Authors Fernando Fortunato Jeronimo a, *, Júlia Lopes Henke b, Rodrigo Barbosa Gonçalves b, c, Camila Silveira Souza d, Isabela Galarda Varassin a, e
Affiliations a Graduate Programme in Botany, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, PR, 81531-980, Brazil; b Graduate Programme in Entomology, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, PR, 81531-980, Brazil; c Department of Zoology, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, PR, 81531-980, Brazil; d Graduate Programme in Applied Botany, State University of Montes Claros, Montes Claros, MG, 39401-089, Brazil; e Department of Botany, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, PR, 81531-980, Brazil
Corresponding author
Abstract Pollination is a key ecosystem service for agriculture, and it is under severe threat due to ecosystem simplification driven by agricultural intensification. Polyculture is a diversified farming system with strong potential to reconcile pollination conservation with food security, yet their effects on the composition of crop-pollinator interactions remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigated how surrounding agricultural landscapes and farm management influenced the composition of interactions between crops and their pollinators in smallholding polyculture farms. Specifically, we assessed how landscape structure and farm complexity affected interaction dissimilarity between local farm networks and the regional interaction pool (meta-network). We found high β-diversity of interactions, mostly due to species turnover, indicating strong filtering of crop-pollinator interactions within farms. Turnover was stronger in plants, reflecting the influence of farm management on the interaction’s diversity. We also found that farm complexity reduced both interaction β-diversity and species turnover, suggesting that more complex farms are able to retain a greater diversity of interactions relative to the regional pool, buffering the high interaction β-diversity present in agroecosystems. Conversely, farm complexity increased dissimilarity driven by interaction rewiring and pollinator turnover, indicating that farm complexity may affect pollinators choices, shaped by the spatial arrangement of resources. Together, these results highlight that polyculture management is a key determinant of crop-pollinator interactions that sustain agricultural production, and plays a central role in both the provision and conservation of pollination.
Key-words: Agroecosystem management, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, farm complexity, landscape structure.
Repository Contents This repository provides the R session info and all the necessary code to reproduce the statistical analyses and figures presented in the manuscript.