Opposing patterns of altitude-driven pollinator turnover in the tropical and temperate Americas

Abiotic factors (e.g., temperature, precipitation) vary markedly along elevational gradients and differentially affect major groups of pollinators. Ectothermic bees, for example, are impeded in visiting flowers by cold and rainy conditions common at high elevations, while endothermic hummingbirds may continue foraging under such conditions. Despite the possibly far-reaching effects of the abiotic environment on plant-pollinator interactions, we know little about how these factors play out at broad ecogeographic scales. We address this knowledge gap by investigating how pollination systems vary across elevations in 26 plant clades from the Americas. Specifically, we explore Cruden’s 1972 hypothesis that the harsh montane environment drives a turnover from insect to vertebrate pollination at higher elevations. We compared the elevational distribution and bioclimatic attributes for a total of 2232 flowering plants and found that Cruden’s hypothesis only holds in the tropics. Above 30° N an..., DATASETS

alloc_new_220802.csv - pruned GBIF occurrences retained after filtering through CoordinateCleaner
forupload_20220906_formatted - median values (elevation, latitude, longitude, climatic variables) calculated for each species from alloc_new_220802.csv
biogeotree.tre - phylogenetic tree extracted from PhyloMaker.R with tips matching species in our dataset

For details on data processing and filtering, please see the Methods section in the associated manuscript. Details on data sources for the gbif data can be found here: 
https://doi.org/10.15468/dd.7rpshm
 , , # Opposing patterns of altitude-driven pollinator turnover in the tropical and temperate Americas

https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bcc2fqzfg

The data provided is the molecular phylogeny (.tre) obtaind from Jin & Qian 2019, pruned to cover species included in our dataset (932 of the 2232 taxa). This phylogenetic tree was used to run phylogenetic GLMMs to test for the effect of abiotic climatic variables and latitude on the distribution of pollination strategies, while accounting for phylogenetic non-independence.

### Description of the data and file structure

The .tre file is a phylogenetic tree pruned from V.Phylomaker (Jin & Qian 2019; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecog.04434) to only contain species that match our list of species with pollinator information.

### Sharing/Access information

The backbone phylogeny can be obtained directly from Jin & Qian 2019, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecog.04434

### Code/Software

We performed al...