Impact of Climate-Induced Habitat Fragmentation on Pollinator Diversity in Tropical Forest Ecosystems

Abstract

A substantial proportion of global biodiversity lives in tropical forests, which are also highly important for the diversity of pollinator communities. Nevertheless, ongoing climate change has caused habitat fragmentation to proceed to the point of structure and ecological integrity of these ecosystems being altered spatially. This paper investigates how habitat fragmentation caused by climatic changes affects pollinator diversity in tropical forest landscapes, combining metrics of landscape ecology from the field, with survey of pollinator diversity, and with space for assessing climatic variability. There is a strong association between decreased pollinator species richness and abundance in forest patches with very high fragmentation and losses of specialist pollinators, including stingless bees and orchid bees. Out of these, fragment breakdown, reduced floral resource availability, and fluctuations of microclimatic conditions resulted as key drivers of decline in pollinators. Plant–pollinator interactions and mutualistic networks are severely threatened by the disruption of these plant–pollinator interactions, and their associated mutualistic networks. These results underscore the need for climate adaptive planning for biodiversity conservation in tropical ecosystems involving pollinator corridors and forest connectivity restoration.