Home field advantage for native floral species: Plant provenance and pollinators in a Maryland old field community

With current declines in biodiversity, including that of native plant species, further study examining the complex relationship between flowering plants and their pollinators is vital. Introduced plants continue to alter the composition of plant communities, with several potential outcomes for plant-pollinator interactions. Introduced plants may be disfavored by local pollinators due to shorter time of establishment or they may decrease pollinator visitation to native plants via competition. This study seeks to examine the effect of plant provenance on floral abundance and pollinator visitation in a diverse old field community. Our study site at the McDaniel Environmental Center in Carroll County, Maryland is part of a long-term ecological study. Floral abundance and pollinator visitation surveys were conducted in 2019 and 2021 in order to evaluate pollination rates for native and introduced plant species.  The study found inconclusive effects of provenance on floral abundance and pollination rate, but data from 2021 indicated that introduced species showed greater floral abundance. No statistically significant difference in pollination rates between native and introduced species was found at this time. This indicates that, despite competition, neither native nor introduced species are out-competing each other for pollinators. Future directions will likely include broadening the current data set to resolve variation between study years as well as examining morphological similarities between native and introduced flowering species to analyze why pollinators do not differentiate between native and introduced plant species on a plot level.