Pollinators are a vital component of our ecosystems, but often fly under the radar in our day-to-day lives. According to the USDA, 3/4ths of the world’s flowering plants and ~35% of food crops are dependent on pollinators to reproduce. Using two datasets from Web of Life, I aimed to examine the complex relationships that exist between pollinators and plants in the eastern US.
Using a Yifan Hu layout in Gephi, we can pretty quickly see the nodes cluster themselves roughly by location. Some of the nodes with high connections strengths have highly specialized relationships, such as the Spring Beauty Miner (Andrena erigeniae) which only pollinates the Eastern Springbeauty flower (Claytonia virginica).
In order to further break down this network and provide the viewer with a bit more information, I used Tableau to create a few different charts showing the breakdown of type of pollinator, type of plant, and native status. This along with highlighting a few key species in the network above allows me to better illustrate the components of these networks without including the species name for every node (which was too visually busy to comprehend according to feedback I received from a few users).
Although the term ‘pollinator’ may evoke imagery of honeybees for the average person, Apis mellifera, the Western Honeybee is actually an introduced species originating from Europe. Higher in the ranks of the pollination network are our native species of bees, flies, and some butterflies in North America.
Moving forward, I would really like to expand this dashboard to include an interactive component so that the user can hover over each node in order to learn more about the network. I’m also working on learning to use GBIF in order to easily extract vernacular names, Red List status, and other key information from the Catalogue of Life database, but that aspect may take a bit more time and learning curve than the other components.
Attributions:
Images:
By The Cosmonaut – Own work
This image was created with darktable., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92468888
“Photo 521850176” by Santiago Jaume-Schinkel is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0,
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/290105212
“Photo 271406779” by Riley-Brendan Walsh is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/156960649
“Photo 319670408” by scotstewart is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/183250024
All other images are my own.
Data:
Motten, A. F. 1982. Pollination Ecology of the Spring Wildflower Community in the Deciduous Forests of Piedmont North Carolina. Doctoral Dissertation thesis, Duke University, Duhram, North Carolina, USA; Motten, A. F. 1986. Pollination ecology of the spring wildflower community of a temperate deciduous forest. Ecological Monographs 56:21-42.
Oppenheimer, R. L., and Lill, J. T. (2021). A Plant-Bee Visitation Network for Plummers Island, MD. Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, 123(2): 365-381.
Data files retrieved from: https://www.web-of-life.es/