Abstract
Pollinators and pollination services provide invaluable ecosystem services to agriculture and contribute to the maintenance of biodiversity. In Chile, pollination contributes greatly to the diversity of native ecosystems and provides ecosystem services to crops, but local pollinator abundance and diversity, as well as plant-animal interactions, remain poorly understood. We compiled all available information from the published scientific literature on pollinators, flower visitors, and plant-pollinator interactions in Chile and found 120 publications from which we extracted 2619 records. Those records contain locality, habit type, and establishment means of 357 plant species from 83 families. Thus, we built a database compiling information on their pollinators and flower visitors, including information on 492 pollinator species from 97 families and 13 orders. Our database provides the first systematisation of information about pollinators and pollination in Chile. This country relies heavily on pollinators both for its agricultural industry and its unique and highly endemic biodiversity. This information can be reused in future studies and would contribute significantly to pollinator conservation strategies.
Highlights
Recent studies estimate that over 87% of the flowering plant species rely on biotic pollination[4]
Plant-pollinator interactions are among the key processes that generate and maintain biodiversity[7,8]
Because of the importance of pollination in the maintenance of biodiversity and the economic benefits of agricultural crop production, there is an urgent need to understand the causes behind the current decline in pollinator species
Summary
In recent years there has been an increasing concern regarding the global decline of pollinators and pollination services[1–3]. Wild plant species and natural ecosystems provide several products and services, including nutrient cycling, medicine, food, a source of pollinators for domesticated crops, and alternative food and shelter sources for agricultural pollinators[9]. Because of the importance of pollination in the maintenance of biodiversity and the economic benefits of agricultural crop production, there is an urgent need to understand the causes behind the current decline in pollinator species. In this sense, collating and reviewing existing information on pollinators and making this information accessible in the form of a user-friendly database is of immeasurable value. This pollination catalogue for Chile adds to other international efforts of systematising this information as, for example, the Catalogue of Afrotropical Bees[28] and the CPC Plant Pollinators Database[29]
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