Pollinator visits to six plant species in an oil palm landscape

Pollination sustains biodiversity and food security, but pollinators are threatened by habitat degradation, fragmentation and loss. Here we aimed to assess how remaining forests influence bee visits to flowers in an oil palm dominated landscape in Borneo, Indonesia. To do this, we observed pollinator visits to six plant species: four crops (Capsicum frutescens L. “chili”; Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum. & Nakai “watermelon”; Solanum lycopersicum L. “tomato”; and Solanum melongena L. “eggplant”); one native plant Melastoma malabathricum L. “melastome”; and the exotic Turnera subulata Smith “turnera”. We made one local grid-based and one landscape scale transect-based study spanning to 208 m and 2,130 m from forest, respectively. We recorded a total of 1,535 pollinator visits to 4,831 flowers in 1,046 ten-minute observation periods, with bee visits making up 81.4% of these visits. We observed an overall mean of 0.23 and 0.34 bee visits per flower per ten-minute period for the grid-based and transect studies, respectively. C. lanatus had the highest observed visitation frequency (0.62 visits per flower per ten-minute period) while S. lycopersicum had no observed visits. The dataset includes raw data collected in the field from 22 July – 29 October 2017.