XVI International Botanical Congess

Many insect pollinators are vagile animals that can fly relatively long distances during single foraging bouts. This trait alone would imply that pollinator faunas as a whole should not be particularly susceptible to habitat fragmentation and other forms of habitat degradation. Evidence from regions as disparate as the Argentine chaco, Sweden, Florida and Amazonia, however, indicates that pollinator faunas are strongly affected by habitat disruption, becoming markedly depaupurate with increasing fragmentation. Although the actual mechanisms underlying pollinator depaupuration in habitat fragments are poorly understood, I suggest that, because of pollinators' fine-grained perception of their resource landscape, processes occurring at a local scale are important to understanding large-scale patterns in the diversity and composition of pollinator assemblages. Because of redundancy characterizing plant-pollinator interactions in general, habitat fragmentation does not necessarily lead to the total disruption of this mutualism. Nevertheless, simplification may have subtle but important consequences on the quality of the interaction, hindering the capacity of plants to adapt further to a changing environment.