Investigation Of Bees And Butterflies Visiting Flowers And Application Of Nectar Plants In 8 Urban Parks In Guangzho

With the development of urban construction,urban habitats are lost or fragmented,thus biodiversity declines.Flower-visiting bees and butterflies are an important part of the urban green space ecosystem and one of the groups most vulnerable to urbanization;meanwhile the garden plants are the core of urban biodiversity protection.How to create a plant landscape suitable for the survival of bees and butterflies in the city to improve the urban biodiversity and maintain the stability of the urban ecosystem is an urgent problem to be considered and solved in the current urban landscape configuration.This study takes Guangzhou city parks as the research object,and investigates bee visitors and butterfly visitor in different parks and seasons from December 2019 to November 2021 to solve the following problems:(1)Determine the species of flowervisiting bees/ butterflies and the type of garden plants they visited.(2)Explore the relationship between bee and butterfly visitors and garden plants in different parks and seasons.(3)Quantify the interaction between bee and butterfly visitors and garden plants,and screen the dominant bees and butterfly nectar plants.The main results are shown below:(1)A total of 420 species belonging to 320 genera and 115 families of garden plants were recoded,including 55 families,116 genera and 138 species of bee-nectar plants and 48 families,94 genera and 105 species of butterfly-nectar plants.Among the 14 species of bee visitors and 54 species of butterfly visitors,Apis cerana,Apis mellifera,Pieris rapae,Catopsilia pomona,Delias pasitho were the most common.(2)Among the 8 city parks,Haizhu Wetland Park had the highest richness of bee and butterfly visitors,Luhu Park had the lowest bee visitor richness,and Dongshan Lake Park had the lowest butterfly visitor richness.In different seasons,the bee and butterfly visitor richness were the highest in autumn,and the lowest in winter.The flower-visiting activities of bees and butterflies were affected by multiple environmental factors.The nectar plant richness had a significant impact the composition of the visiting bee and butterfly community.(3)The interaction between 138 species of garden plants and 14 species of bee visitors,105 species of garden plants and 54 species of butterfly visitors formed a generalized ecological network structure.The interactive diversity and network specialization index of plant to bee and butterfly visitor network with different life forms and different origins indicated that herbs and native plants play an important role in increasing the interactive diversity and supporting more specialized flower visitors,whereas the large number of exotic plants weakened the roles of native plants in the ecological network.Plants with higher partner diversity and more frequent visit could be considered as dominant nectar plants in future landscape construction.This study demonstrated that parks with larger areas and higher plant richness can serve as bee and butterfly habitats and maintain a long-term high bee and butterfly richness.The flowering plant-bees/butterflies pollination network provides a scientific strategy for modern cities to create suitable habitats for bee and butterfly visitors,and is an effective tool for urban green space practice management.Based on the protection of the diversity of bees and butterflies,the construction of urban green space in the future should focus on the construction of native herbaceous plant communities,and give priority to the selection of important nectar plants.