Flowering plant communities mediate the effects of habitat composition and configuration on wild pollinator communities

There is strong evidence that landscape-scale factors such as habitat diversity, composition, and configuration are important drivers of declines in pollinators and pollination services. However, context and species-specific responses make it challenging to draw general conclusions about the most important components of landscapes that support diverse and abundant pollinator communities. In this study, we took a functional traits approach to community assembly and tested the hypothesis that landscape properties act most strongly on pollinators indirectly, through their influence on flowering plant communities. Using plant and pollinator data from 96 landscapes in Britain, we tested the associations between plant and pollinator communities and local environmental factors, such as habitat cover and configuration, using path analysis based on Mantel and partial Mantel statistics. When all pollinators were considered, we found that the environmental factors had stronger links to the composi..., , , # Flowering plant communities mediate the effects of habitat composition and configuration on wild pollinator communities

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2cbx](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2cbx)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains three matrices and two metadata tables. The pollinator matrix is a site x species table of pollinators caught by pan trapping during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The abundance values are pooled from 3 trapping sessions each year.

The plant matrix is a site x species table of flowering plants recorded from transects during the same summers. Abundance data are the pooled number of \"floral units\" (e.g., single flowers, capitula, etc.) from 3 transect recording sessions each year.

The Env_matrix sheet provides all the environmental data recorded from each site (corresponding to a 2x2km grid square) that was used in the paper.

The metadata sheet describes the headings for the environmental data. The species abbreviat...