Phenological mismatches and the demography of solitary bees

Species respond idiosyncratically to environmental variation, which may generate phenological mismatches. We assess the consequences of such mismatches for solitary bees. During nine years, we studied flowering phenology and nesting phenology, and demography of five wood-nesting solitary bee species representing a broad gradient of specialization/generalization in the use of floral resources. We found that the reproductive performance and population growth rate of bees tended to be lower with increasing nesting–flowering mismatches, except for the most generalized bee species. Our findings help elucidate the role of phenological mismatches for the demography of wild pollinators, which perform key ecosystem functions and provide important services for humanity. Furthermore, if climate change increases phenological mismatches in this system, we expect negative consequences of climate change for specialist bees.
, Methods
Study area and sites
The study was conducted in ttwo 2-ha sites located at ca. 1250 m above sea level in Villavicencio Nature Reserve and its vicinity (32° 32' S, 68° 57' W), Las Heras Department, Mendoza Province, Argentina. Each site consisted of a 100 m × 200 m plot. Because data come from several projects running consecutively at the same sites, there are minor differences in the sampling methods used in different years.
Flower abundance
Our estimate of flowering phenology of the plant species present in our study sites is based on weekly estimates of the floral density in fixed plots and transects, conducted during the flowering season of the majority of plant species (September–December). During the flowering season, floral density was measured weekly at fixed quadrats/transects: forty regularly spaced 2 m × 2 m quadrats in 2006, five fixed 50 m × 2 m transect belts in 2007, and four 8 m × 20 m plots plus two 2 m × 50 m transects in the remaining years (2008–2014). Flower ..., , # Data from: Phenological mismatches and the demography of solitary bees

The dataset includes a series of data files with flower abundance, trap nests, insect adult emergence. A series of R codes accompany the data files to process the raw data to produce the data tables that we have used for analyses. We describe below the contents of each class of data files.

## Description of the Data and file structure

### Flower abundance

The flower abundance data are stored in the file `plants.csv`. The R script `plant_data.r` reads this file and makes a few additional calculations on these data. The file `plants.csv` contains the following six columns:

* **sitio:** The study site code.
* **Fecha:** The date in which the data were collected.
* **fecha.rel:** The relative date in days, i.e., the number of days in each study years begining on July 1 (e.g., July 15 would be day 15, whereas August 1 would be day 32).
* **ano:** The study year, defined as the year in which the flowering season sta...,