Corresponding author: Franziska Baden-Böhm ( franziska.baden-boehm@thuenen.de ) Corresponding author: Mario App ( mario.app@thuenen.de ) © Franziska Baden-Böhm, Mario App, Jan Thiele. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Baden-Böhm F, App M, Thiele J (2022) The FloRes Database: A floral resources trait database for pollinator habitat-assessment generated by a multistep workflow. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e83537 |
The decline of pollinating insects in agricultural landscapes proceeds due to intensive land use and the associated loss of habitat and food sources. Those insects depend on the spatial and temporal distribution of nectar and pollen as food resource. Hence, for nature conservation the spatio-temporal assessment of food quantity of habitats is necessary. Therefore, sufficient data of floral plant traits are required.
We present a raw database with the plant traits 1. flowering period, 2. floral-unit density, 3. nectar (nectar volume or sugar content of floral unit), 4. sugar concentration in nectar, 5. pollen mass or volume per floral unit, 6. protein content of pollen and 7. corolla depth. All traits are sampled from literature and online databases. The raw database consists of 843 unspecified (sp.) and specified plant species belong to 488 genera and 102 families with missing information. For utilizing the raw data, we developed a stepwise workflow unifying traits to comparable entities with identical units and aggregating them to an application database, called the FloRes Database (Floral Resources Database). FloRes contains the complete information of traits for 38 taxa and, when corolla depth is excluded, for 70 taxa. The stepwise workflow is implemented in five consecutive scripts written in R, that allow other users easily add information to the raw data and to compute their own application data set. FloRes can be used to evaluate food-resource supply of habitats for pollinators, e.g., to compare seed mixtures of agri-environmental measure, such as flower strips, taking into account flower phenology on a daily basis. Further, calculated for-resource supply can be used as input for simulation models of pollinator populations, such as the agent-based models BumbleBEEHAVE and SyrFitSources.