Multivariate flower phenotype and proboscis length shape specialised pollination niches

By analysing multivariate floral traits and the topology of the pollination network in a community of coexisting plant species that share pollinators, we investigated whether plant-pollinator interactions are influenced by multivariate flower phenotype and/or  morphological traits. , We used plant-pollinator network topology to objectively characterise pollination niches. We built the quantitative plant-pollinator interaction matrix assigning to each cell the average visitation rate (i.e. number of visited flowers per observation period) across observation periods of each pollinator morphospecies (j columns) to a given plant species (i rows). We first tested whether the interaction network exhibited a nested and/or modular structure. We detected the main pollinators in each module taking into account the individualisation of species with greater importance in the network modules recognition.To characterise the overall variation in floral phenotype among the 11 vervain species, we constructed a matrix containing nine quantitative variables of flower measurements from five individuals per species (N=55). The variables included were: floral display (number of flowers per inflorescence and inflorescence area), flower colour (PC1 and PC2 coefficients of the PCA of the re..., # Multivariate flower phenotype and proboscis length shape specialised pollination niches

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.w3r228144](10.5061/dryad.w3r228144)

## Description of the data and file structure

We have submitted: 1) a matrix describing a quantitative interaction network between vervain species and their pollinators (Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt), 2) a matrix describing the multivariate flower phenotype of the vervain species (NMDSVerb.txt), 3) the mean corolla tube length of the vervain species and the mean proboscis length of the pollinator species (TraitMatchingMEan2.txt) and 4) the individual corolla tube and proboscis lengths (TraitMatchingXpollinatorsXeachcorolla.txt) and 5) R script for running all the analyses described in the article (Script_Verbenaceae-pollinators.R).

Files 1, 2, 3 and 4 are needed to succesfully run the file 5) R script including all the analyses shown in the article. 

The matrix  (Network_Verbenaceae-pollinators.txt) was built by recording a...,