Wild bee functional diversity and plant associations in native and conventional plant nurseries

An ongoing challenge in ecology is predicting how characteristics of communities correspond to habitat features. Examining variation in functional traits across species may reveal patterns not discernible from measures of mere abundance or richness. For beneficial insects like wild bees, functional trait-based approaches are often used to characterize communities in different agricultural habitats.

However, no such approach has yet been applied in horticultural plant nurseries, which represent intensively managed artificial flowering plant assemblages. Certain nurseries mostly cultivate regionally native flowering plants, allowing one to test how differences between local plant assemblages may correlate with bee functional traits.

We surveyed bee assemblages at native and conventional plant nurseries in southern California from spring through autumn over two years, while also documenting the native status of blooming plants in sampling plots. Bees were classified into different fu...