Pollinator visits to six plant species in an oil palm landscape

Pollination sustains biodiversity and food security, but pollinators are
threatened by habitat degradation, fragmentation and loss. Here we aimed
to assess how remaining forests influence bee visits to flowers in an oil
palm dominated landscape in Borneo, Indonesia. To do this, we observed
pollinator visits to six plant species: four crops (Capsicum
frutescens L. “chili”; Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum. & Nakai
“watermelon”; Solanum lycopersicum L. “tomato”; and Solanum melongena L.
“eggplant”); one native plant Melastoma malabathricum L. “melastome”; and
the exotic Turnera subulata Smith “turnera”. We made one local grid-based
and one landscape scale transect-based study spanning to 208 m and 2,130 m
from forest, respectively. We recorded a total of 1,535 pollinator visits
to 4,831 flowers in 1,046 ten-minute observation periods, with bee visits
making up 81.4% of these visits. We observed an overall mean of
0.23 and 0.34 bee visits per flower per ten-minute
period for the grid-based and transect studies, respectively. C.
lanatus had the highest observed visitation
frequency (0.62 visits per flower per ten-minute period)
while S. lycopersicum had no observed visits. The dataset
includes raw data collected in the field from 22 July – 29 October 2017.