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Supplementing East Tennessee Landscapes For Pollinators With Native Perennials, Amani Khalil

Masters Theses

Tennessee, home to the Great Smoky Mountains, is a biodiversity hotspot for many plant and animal species, yet it receives relatively few conservation dollars (Jenkins et al., 2015). As a biodiversity hotspot, this region may be home to many endemic species, but little is known about the abundance or diversity of insect pollinators. In order to both estimate pollinator communities in East Tennessee and pollinator forage preferences for native Tennessee plants, we established four plots, comprised of three plant families across five common land use types. Over two field seasons we collected nearly 7,300 insect specimens with a total sampling …