Land-use legacies affect flower visitation network structure after forest restoration

Agricultural land use causes drastic changes to ecosystems, which persist after agricultural activity has stopped. One way to mitigate these impacts is through restoration of post-agricultural lands; however, the interplay between agricultural history and restoration remains poorly understood. This is particularly true for interactions among species. We investigated the effect of experimental restoration of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) forests with differing land use histories on floral visitation networks. We found that restoration of open canopy conditions caused drastic increases in floral and floral visitor abundance and species richness. We found that after restoration, plots with no history of agriculture supported more specialized floral visitations and networks than in post-agricultural plots. These results illustrate large positive effects of forest restoration and flowering of understory plants and floral visitation, along with a persistent agricultural land-use legac..., Study site and experimental design
This study was conducted on the Savannah River Site, an 80,000 ha National Environmental Research Park in Aiken and Barnwell Counties, South Carolina, USA. It is a United States Department of Energy site with forest management conducted by the USDA Forest Service. Like much of the Southeastern United States, uplands at the Savannah River Site were historically dominated by longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) savannahs characterized by widely spaced canopy trees with a highly diverse groundcover plant community. Throughout its range, the vast majority (97%) of the area of this ecosystem has been lost to fire suppression and land conversion to agriculture. By middle of the 20th century, the majority of the Savannah River Site was being used for agriculture. When the Savannah River Site was acquired by the federal government in 1951, approximately 6000 residents were relocated to surrounding areas, and all agricultural activity was abandoned. The Forest..., , # Land-use legacies affect floral visitation network structure after forest restoration

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0k6djhb90](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0k6djhb90)

## Description of the data and file structure

This data was collected for a floral visitation interaction network study conducted in the Remnant Project in 2017. The Remnant Project is a two-level split plot design experiment which crosses land-use history (history of tillage agricultural and no history of tillage) with restoration treatments (canopy thinning and no canopy thinning). The study was conducted on Savannah River Site in Aiken and Barnwell Counties, South Carolina, USA.

### Files and variables

#### File: breland\_\_et\_al\_2024\_floral\_visitation\_interactions.csv

**Description:** Host plant-floral visitor interactions data from eight experimental sites across the Savannah River Site collected in September and October of 2017. Each line of data is an individual insect floral visitor and the associat...