Skip to main content
Entomology 2025 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
 
Oral Presentation
Oral Presentation
Poster Display
Poster Display
Student Competition
Student Competition
Ticketed Event
Ticketed Event

10-Minute Presentation

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

10-min: P-IE, Vectors of Plant Disease

Quantifying ecosystem services with a foraging biology lens: Floral resources interact with pollinator communities to mediate the pollination service cascade

Wednesday, November 12, 2025
3:18 PM - 3:30 PM Pacific
Location: Oregon Convention Center, D137-138, OCC
Oral Presentation
Ecosystem services are essential for human well-being, especially in urban areas where an estimated 60% of the world’s population will live by 2030 and where an increasing proportion of food production (currently ~15-20%) takes place. Pollinators mediate critical plant reproductive services in urban agroecosystems, but as mobile foragers, they are also sensitive to non-crop floral resources, which could act to concentrate or dilute their pollination services. Across 24 urban gardens in central California, we investigated potential interactions between the pollinator community (abundance and diversity) and local floral resources, as well as the impact of non-floral habitat management on pollen deposition, flower-to-fruit phenological turnover, and fruit volume, for the widely cultivated garden tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). We found that pollinator abundance and diversity significantly interacted with local floral abundance to positively mediate plant reproduction, but only in the early portion of the pollination service cascade. Specifically, pollinator diversity significantly interacted with local floral resource levels to positively impact tomato pollen deposition and flower-to-fruit phenological turnover, indicating a forager concentration effect. Later in the cascade, the number of trees and shrubs within a garden had a negative effect on the volume of tomato fruit produced, revealing a key trade-off between food production and tree density. Overall, our results reveal that increasing floral abundance within urban garden systems does not reduce focal crop pollination, but in fact enhances it, and that spatial separation between herbaceous crops and shade trees may reduce tradeoffs in urban garden crop production.