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Effects of climate warming on flowering plants, pollinators and their interactions.

WANG Ying-jie1, LU Ning-na2, YANG Jie-yu1, DING Tian-feng1, ZHAO Zhi-gang1*#br#   

  1. (1 State Key Laboratory of Grassland and AgroEcosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China; 2 School of Life Sciences, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730000, China).
  • Online:2017-07-10 Published:2017-07-10

Abstract: The interactions between flowering plants and their pollinators constitute complex pollination networks. Over the past twenty years, the effects of global warming, as the main feature of climate change, on flowering plants, pollinators and their interactions have become a hot topic of research. These studies will help us to better predict the effect of climate warming on pollination networks and even the ecosystem functions. This paper reviews the influences of climate warming on reproduction of flowering plants, including flowering phenology, characteristics of floral attraction and reward, pollinator activities and plantpollinator interactions, as well as plantpollinator networks at the community level. Flowering plants can respond to climate warming by adjusting floral resource availability (the amount of nectar, the quantity and quality of pollen) and reproduction output of pollinating insects. Climate warming can affect pollinatormediated patterns of pollen flow and thus pollination success. Under the background of climate warming, therefore, changes in plants, pollinators and their interactions will alter the structure of pollination networks. However, the pollination networks can alleviate the mismatch between plants and pollinators caused by inconsistent changes by the buffering mechanisms, and thus maintain the stability. Overall, the studies on pollination networks under the background of global warming are still lacking, and future researches should highlight the following aspects: (1) to shed light on the causes and mechanisms of effects of global warming on phenology matching degree between plants and pollinators; (2) further to explore interactions between plants and pollinators in different ecosystems globally; (3) to conduct longterm studies of interaction networks between plants and pollinators at the levels of community and ecosystem.

Key words: nitrification inhibitor, soil acidification, soil CO2 emission, nitrogen fertilizer, inorganic carbon