Abstract
Urban growth is occurring rapidly, and the land use changes associated
with urbanization may have consequences for pollinators and the plants
that rely on them. There is both evidence that urban areas support
diverse pollinator communities and evidence that they degrade them. The
influence of urbanization on the pollination of urban plants is even
less understood. Urban agriculture relies on plant-pollinator
interactions for crop production, providing a relevant framework to
study pollination in an urban context. We therefore grew 240 plants
across six sites at varying levels of urbanization in Chicago, Illinois,
to investigate how urbanization relates to pollination in a generalized
pollination system in Cucurbita pepo (squash) and a more specialized
pollination system in the buzz-pollinated Solanum lycopersicum (tomato).
We used a pollen limitation experiment to test whether the reproduction
of plants at urban farms is pollen-limited and whether the magnitude of
pollen limitation varies with the extent of urbanization, quantified as
the percent of impervious surface surrounding each site. We also
examined how pollinator visitation rates vary with urbanization. In S.
lycopersicum but not C. pepo, the pollen addition treatment had a
consistent and significant positive effect on reproductive success,
indicating that plants of S. lycopersicum are pollen-limited in our
study area. The magnitude of this pollen limitation (the difference in
reproduction between paired control and pollen-supplemented plants)
increased with greater impervious surface. The limited evidence for
pollen limitation in the more generalized C. pepo suggests that plants
with more specialized pollination systems are subject to greater pollen
limitation in urban environments. Together, our results demonstrate that
urban plants are likely experiencing deficits in pollination services,
in ways that increase with the level of urbanization in the surrounding
area but vary with the type of pollination system.