Data from: Climatic conditions and landscape diversity predict plant-bee interactions and pollen deposition in bee-pollinated plants.

Climate change, landscape homogenization and the decline of beneficial
insects threaten pollination services to wild plants and crops.
Understanding how pollination potential (i.e. the capacity of ecosystems
to support pollination of plants) is affected by climate change and
landscape homogenization is fundamental for our ability to predict how
such anthropogenic stressors affect plant biodiversity. Models of
pollinator potential are improved when based on pairwise plant-pollinator
interactions and pollinator´s plant preferences. However, whether the sum
of predicted pairwise interactions with a plant within a habitat (a proxy
for pollination potential) relates to pollen deposition on flowering
plants has not yet been investigated. We sampled plant-bee interactions in
68 Scandinavian plant communities in landscapes of varying land-cover
heterogeneity along a latitudinal temperature gradient of 4–8 C°, and
estimated pollen deposition as the number of pollen grains on flowers of
the bee-pollinated plants Lotus corniculatus, and Vicia cracca. We show
that plant-bee interactions, and the pollination potential for these
bee-pollinated plants increase with landscape diversity, annual mean
temperature, plant abundance, and decrease with distances to
sand-dominated soils. Furthermore, the pollen deposition in flowers
increased with the predicted pollination potential, which was driven by
landscape diversity and plant abundance. Our study illustrates that the
pollination potential, and thus pollen deposition, for wild plants can be
mapped based on spatial models of plant-bee interactions that incorporate
pollinator-specific plant preferences. Maps of pollination potential can
be used to guide conservation and restoration planning.