Pollination of Polish red list plants: a preliminary statistical survey

Abstract

One of the important problems of modern conservation biology is the lack of reliable data on plant pollination systems, especially for taxa threatened with extinction. This paper is an attempt to collect and analyze the available literature data on pollination of Polish red list plants. The Polish red list includes 469 angiosperm taxa, over 53% of them are insect-pollinated and visited mostly by bees and flies, insects that are also declining in Europe. These numbers however are mainly based on lists of fl ower visitors and detailed studies of pollination biology or breeding system are available for less than 20% of the taxa, with further 10% almost completely unstudied in terms of their life histories. The paper indicates that there is an urgent need to study plant-pollinator relationships in order to better conserve the biodiversity in local and global scales.