D3085: Comparing bee plant-pollinator interactions across agroecosystem landscapes

Landscape context can greatly affect the stability and composition of pollinator communities. Within agroecosystems, a wide variation exists in the composition of such landscapes. In addition to this, with pollinator diversity in global decline and area converted to agricultural land use on the rise, it is pertinent to assess how bee communities fare within variable agroecosystem landscapes. This study draws from publicly available data in Bloom et al.’s 2021 paper, Documenting pollinator communities, floral hosts, and plant-pollinator interactions in Pacific Northwest United States agroecosystem. Bloom et al.’s study systematically documented bee-plant interactions in farming systems within the United States Pacific Northwest. Using this interaction data, I seek to determine whether landscape variation within agroecosystems affects the stability and composition of bee plant-pollinator networks. I hypothesize that as a landscape becomes more developed for agricultural usage and therefore less diverse, the stability of the networks will decrease. This would be indicated by lower values in network metrics such as connectance, nestedness, and robustness upon analysis. I additionally investigate the effect of organic status of growing operations and edge-area ratio on network stability.