Data from: Constructing more informative plant-pollinator networks: visitation and pollen deposition networks in a heathland plant community

Interaction networks are widely used as tools to understand plant-pollinator communities, and to examine potential threats to plant diversity and food security if the ecosystem service provided by pollinating animals declines. However most networks to date are based on recording visits to flowers, rather than recording clearly-defined effective pollination events. Here we provide the first networks that explicitly incorporate measures of pollinator effectiveness (PE) from pollen deposition on stigmas per visit, and pollinator importance (PI) as the product of PE and visit frequency. These more informative networks, here produced for a low diversity heathland habitat, reveal that plant-pollinator interactions are more specialised than shown in most previous studies. At the studied site the specialisation index H2’ was lower for the visitation network than the PE network, which was in turn lower than H2’ for the PI network. Our study shows that collecting pollinator effectiveness data is feasible for community-level studies in low diversity communities and that including information about pollinator effectiveness can change the structure of interaction networks. This could have important consequences for our understanding of threats to pollination systems.