Biotic and abiotic drivers of plant-pollinator community assembly across wildfire gradients

1. Understanding how abiotic disturbance and biotic interactions determine pollinator and flowering-plant diversity is critically important given global climate change and widespread pollinator declines. To predict responses of pollinators and flowering-plant communities to changes in wildfire disturbance, a mechanistic understanding of how these two trophic levels respond to wildfire severity is needed.

2. We compared site-to-site variation in community composition (β-diversity), species richness, and abundances of pollinators and flowering plants among landscapes with no recent wildfire (unburned), mixed-severity wildfire, and high-severity wildfire in three sites across the Northern Rockies Ecoregion, USA. We used variation partitioning to assess the relative contributions of wildfire, other abiotic variables (climate, soils, topography), and biotic associations among plant and pollinator composition to community assembly of both trophic levels.

3. Wildfire disturbance generall...