cited By 0 ; International audience ; Insect pollinators provide vital ecosystem services through its maintenance of plant biological diversity and its role in food production. Indeed, adequate pollination services can increase the production and quality of fruit and vegetable crops. This service is currently challenged by land use intensification and expanding human population growth. Hence, this study aims: (1) to assess the pollination services in different land uses with different levels of disturbance through GIS mapping technique using insect pollinators abundance and richness as indicators, and (2) estimate the economic value of pollination by insects in agricultural crops. Our study takes place in a small oceanic island, Terceira (Azores, Portugal). Our results showed, remarkably, that not only the pristine vegetation areas, but also the orchards and agricultural areas have relatively high values of pollination services, even though both land uses have opposite disturbance levels. For the economic valuation, we analyzed 24 crops in the island and found that 18 depend on pollinators with one-third of these crops having 65% or 95% dependence on pollinators. The economic contribution of pollinators totals 36.2% of the total mean annual agricultural income of the dependent crops, highlighting the importance of insect pollinators in agricultural production and consequent economic gain productions.
BACKGROUND: For a remote oceanic archipelago of up to 8 Myr age, the Azores have a comparatively low level of endemism. We present an analysis of phylogeographic patterns of endemic Azorean island arthropods aimed at testing patterns of diversification in relation to the ontogeny of the archipelago, in order to distinguish between alternative models of evolutionary dynamics on islands. We collected individuals of six species (representing Araneae, Hemiptera and Coleoptera) from 16 forest fragments from 7 islands. Using three mtDNA markers, we analysed the distribution of genetic diversity within and between islands, inferred the differentiation time-frames and investigated the inter-island migration routes and colonization patterns. RESULTS: Each species exhibited very low levels of mtDNA divergence, both within and between islands. The two oldest islands were not strongly involved in the diffusion of genetic diversity within the archipelago. The most haplotype-rich islands varied according to species but the younger, central islands contributed the most to haplotype diversity. Colonization events both in concordance with and in contradiction to an inter-island progression rule were inferred, while a non-intuitive pattern of colonization from western to eastern islands was also inferred. CONCLUSIONS: The geological development of the Azores has followed a less tidy progression compared to classic hotspot archipelagos, and this is reflected in our findings. The study species appear to have been differentiating within the Azores for <2 Myr, a fraction of the apparent life span of the archipelago, which may indicate that extinction events linked to active volcanism have played an important role. Assuming that after each extinction event, colonization was initiated from a nearby island hosting derived haplotypes, the apparent age of species diversification in the archipelago would be moved closer to the present after each extinction-recolonization cycle. Exploiting these ideas, we propose a general model for future testing. ; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT); IRA - Regional Fund for Science and Technology and Pro-Emprego program of the Regional Government of the Azores. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Phylogenetic relatedness is a key diversity measure for the analysis and understanding of how species and communities evolve across time and space. Understanding the nonrandom loss of species with respect to phylogeny is also essential for better-informed conservation decisions. However, several factors are known to influence phylogenetic reconstruction and, ultimately, phylogenetic diversity metrics. In this study, we empirically tested how some of these factors (topological constraint, taxon sampling, genetic markers and calibration) affect phylogenetic resolution and uncertainty. We built a densely sampled, species-level phylogenetic tree for spiders, combining Sanger sequencing of species from local communities of two biogeographical regions (Iberian Peninsula and Macaronesia) with a taxon-rich backbone matrix of Genbank sequences and a topological constraint derived from recent phylogenomic studies. The resulting tree constitutes the most complete spider phylogeny to date, both in terms of terminals and background information, and may serve as a standard reference for the analysis of phylogenetic diversity patterns at the community level. We then used this tree to investigate how partial data affect phylogenetic reconstruction, phylogenetic diversity estimates and their rankings, and, ultimately, the ecological processes inferred for each community. We found that the incorporation of a single slowly evolving marker (28S) to the DNA barcode sequences from local communities, had the highest impact on tree topology, closely followed by the use of a backbone matrix. The increase in missing data resulting from combining partial sequences from local communities only had a moderate impact on the resulting trees, similar to the difference observed when using topological constraints. Our study further revealed substantial differences in both the phylogenetic structure and diversity rankings of the analyzed communities estimated from the different phylogenetic treatments, especially when using non-ultrametric trees (phylograms) instead of time-stamped trees (chronograms). Finally, we provide some recommendations on reconstructing phylogenetic trees to infer phylogenetic diversity within ecological studies. ; Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015); ERA-Net Net-Biome research framework, financed through Portuguese FCT-NETBIOME grant 0003/2011; ERA-Net Net-Biome financed through Canary Islands Government ACIISI grants SE-12/02, SE-12/03, SE-12/04; FEDER; FCT MACDIV-FCT-PTDC/BIABIC/0054/2014; Organismo Autonomo de Parques Nacionales Spain (OAPN #485/2012); Catalan Government; APIF PhD fellowship from the University of Barcelona; Juan de la Cierva Fellowship (FJCI-2015-23723); FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Norma Transitoria-DL57/2016/CP1375/CT0003); University of Helsinki. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Understanding patterns of community structure and the causes for their variation can be furthered by comparative biogeographic analyses of island biotas. We used woody plant data at the local scale to investigate variations in species rarity, alpha, beta, and gamma diversity within and between three islands from the oceanic archipelagoes of Azores, Canaries and Mascarene. We used standardized protocols to sample ten 50 m × 50 m forest plots in each of the three islands with contrasting climate and regional species pools: Terceira (Azores), Tenerife (Canaries), and Reunion (Mascarene Islands). Occupancy frequency distributions and species abundance distributions were used to investigate rarity. The partitioning of beta diversity in a distance-decay framework was used to test for spatial patterns of community composition. Rarity was much more pronounced in the highly diverse islands of Tenerife and Reunion than in the regionally poorer island of Terceira. The number of species rose faster with increasing sample area in both Tenerife and Reunion. The slope of the species rank abundance curve was steeper in Terceira whereas the richer island assemblages approached a lognormal model. Compositional changes according to spatial distance were mostly due to replacement of species in Terceira and Reunion. Our results point to important differences in the community structure of Terceira, which is the less diverse and temperate region in comparison to Tenerife and Reunion which are highly diverse. ; This research was supported by the ERA-Net Net -Biome research framework, financed through the: Canary Islands Government ACIISI grants SE-12/02 (PO), SE-12/03 (JCC), SE-12/04 (BE), co-financed by FEDER; Portuguese FCT-NETBIOME grant 0003/2011 (PB); French ANR-NETBIOME grant n°11-EBIM-001-01 (CT); Région Reunion council for research activities (DS), Universitéde La Reunion contract DGADD/PE/20120585 (DS). CR, FR and IRA were supported by grants from Fundação da Ciência e Tecnologia - FCT-SFRH/BPD/91357/2012, FCT-PTDC/BIA-BIC/119255/2010, FCT-SFRH/BPD/102804/2014 respectively. MF has been funded by Direcção Regional da Ciência e Tecnologia, DRCT-M3.1.7/F/002/2011 and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico-CNPq (401045/2014-5), Programa Ciência sem Fronteiras; the current MF's contract is supported by the Universidad de Alcalá. The work of LBD in this manuscript was performed within the scope of the project MOMENTOS (PTDC/BIA-BIC/5558/2014). ; Peer Reviewed
