What if biodiversity is self-limiting? Pollination of endemic species in hyperdiverse plant communities (ENDLIMIT)

Clara de Vega Durán, María Concepción Alonso Menéndez, Carlos Manuel Herrera Maliani, Mónica Medrano Martínez, Antonio Castilla Álvarez, Víctor Parra Tabla, Miriam Montserrat Ferrer Ortega, Luis Alejandro Abdala Roberts, Tia-Lynn Ashman, Gerardo Arceo Gómez, Alexandra Sasha Rohde.

Recent bibliographical analyses show that, everywhere in the world, plant reproduction suffers stronger constraints due to pollen shortages in communities with a high species diversity. This pattern is extremely interesting from a conservation biology standpoint, as it is likely that the reproduction and survival of many of the endemic and endangered species that characterize hyperdiverse plant communities will be especially affected by global change processes with adverse effects on native pollinators.
Our ultimate goals are: to establish whether the endemic nature of many of the species forming high-diversity plant communities affects reproductive success and pollen limitation, and whether pollination success and pollen limitation exhibit predictable responses in the presence of an increase in species diversity. The results will provide development input for plant diversity conservation plans in southern Spain, California and Yucatan.