Data: Measuring plant attractiveness to pollinators: methods and considerations

Global pollinator declines have fostered increased public interest in
creating pollinator-friendly gardens in human-managed landscapes. Indeed,
studies on urban pollinator communities suggest that flower-rich
greenspaces can serve as promising sites for conservation. Ornamental
flowers, which are readily available at most commercial garden centers,
are ubiquitous in these landscapes. These varieties are often non-native
and highly bred, and their utility to pollinators is complex. In this
study, we used observational data and citizen science to develop a methods
framework that will assist stakeholders in the floriculture industry to
incorporate metrics of pollinator health into existing breeding and
evaluation protocols. The results of this study support how plant
attractiveness to pollinators is often dependent on variables such as
climate and plant phenology, which should be considered when developing an
assessment tool. Furthermore, we found that some cultivars were
consistently attractive across all observations while for other cultivars,
pollinator visitation was apparently conditional. We determine using
multiple statistical tests that 10 min is a sufficient length of time for
observation of most plant types to broadly estimate three measures of
plant attractiveness: visitor abundance, primary visitors attracted, and
cultivar rank attractiveness, without sacrificing efficiency or accuracy.
Additionally, we demonstrate that properly trained non-expert observers
can collect accurate observational data, and our results suggest that
protocols may be designed to maximize consistency across diverse data
collectors.