ArticleThe American naturalist2023
Opposing Patterns of Altitude-Driven Pollinator Turnover in the Tropical and Temperate Americas.
Article in The American naturalist, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pollination Across the Diel Cycle: A Global Meta-Analysis.Ecology letters · 2025Pooled it
- Pollinator efficiency, rather than bee decline, explains a shift to hummingbird pollination in tropical montane forests.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Evidence of introgression amid phylogenetic conflict in Brachyotum, a plant radiation from the Tropical Andes.American journal of botany · 2026Article
- Ecological change may be a common initiator of evolutionary pollinator shifts.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- A mosaic of colors: The influence of biotic and abiotic factors shaping flower color diversity across a tropical mountain ecosystem.American journal of botany · 2026Article
- Pollination ecology in the tropical Andes: moving towards a cross-scale approach.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Beyond the Grant-Stebbins model: floral adaptive landscapes and plant speciation.Annals of botany · 2025Review
- Phylogenomics and macroevolution of a florally diverse Neotropical plant clade.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- Mountain colonization precedes shifts away from bee pollination in Melastomataceae.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Transcontinental patterns in floral pigment abundance among animal-pollinated species.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- The Sequential Direct and Indirect Effects of Mountain Uplift, Climatic Niche, and Floral Trait Evolution on Diversification Dynamics in an Andean Plant Clade.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Local adaptation to hummingbirds and bees in Salvia stachydifolia: insights into pollinator shifts in a Southern Andean sage.Annals of botany · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
AbstractAbiotic factors (e.g., temperature, precipitation) vary markedly along elevational gradients and differentially affect major groups of pollinators. Ectothermic bees, for example, are impeded in visiting flowers by cold and rainy conditions common at high elevations, while endothermic hummingbirds may continue foraging under such conditions. Despite the possibly far-reaching effects of the abiotic environment on plant-pollinator interactions, we know little about how these factors play out at broad ecogeographic scales. We address this knowledge gap by investigating how pollination systems vary across elevations in 26 plant clades from the Americas. Specifically, we explore Cruden's 1972 hypothesis that the harsh montane environment drives a turnover from insect to vertebrate pollination at higher elevations. We compared the elevational distribution and bioclimatic attributes for a total of 2,232 flowering plants and found that Cruden's hypothesis holds only in the tropics. Above 30°N and below 30°S, plants pollinated by vertebrates (mostly hummingbirds) tend to occur at lower elevations than those pollinated by insects. We hypothesize that this latitudinal transition is due to the distribution of moist, forested habitats favored by vertebrate pollinators, which are common at high elevations in the tropics but not in the temperate Americas.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.