In early January, the Brazil team, consisting of César, Marcela, Jota and Carlos met at Sao Paulo Airport with Agnes, and together with Vini de Brito and more students from the Universidade Federal do Uberlândia, the team started scouting for suitable fieldwork sites in the Mata Atlantica. The Mata Atlantica, or Atlantic Rainforest, is a megadiverse wet rainforest on the Eastern coast of Brazil, with only fragments of the natural forest remaining at low elevations close to the popular beaches. Biogeographically, the AF is a very important region since it shows a very interesting connection to the Andean (cloud) forests, with many plant genera having closely related species both in the Andes and the AF.

We chose the AF as our first gradient for the MountBuzz project since it harbours a large diversity of Melastomataceae, and has relatively easy accessibility, perfect for a project where we want to work at different elevations and in different forest types. In the first days, we explored forests starting at the sandy beaches of Parque Estadual do Serra do Mar, and worked our way up through the mountain forests into the high elevation fields of Itatiaia National Park, Brazil’s oldest national park. Our aim is to study pollinator diversity of Melastomataceae communities, as well as reproductive strategies, flower longevity and flower traits of Melastomataceae along the gradient to understand how changes in abiotic and biotic conditions affect trait functioning. To do so, we set up the first three study plots over the past days and spend much time in the cloudy, rainy weather manually pollinating flowers. During sunny hours, we could capture bees and document their behavior. Bee pollinators of Melastomataceae exhibit a very exciting behavior called buzz-pollination, where bees vibrate flowers in order to extract pollen. We use cameras and special microphones to record these bee vibrations to better understand how bees extract pollen from flowers, and whether they vibrate different flowers differently. Besides bee-pollinated species, at high elevations, we also found species which produce nectar and are pollinated by more diverse pollinator assemblages, including wasps, flies, honeybees and hummingbirds.

Our first week of data collection was very successful, and Team Brazil will spend the next 2.5 months collecting these data along the AF elevational gradient. Stay tuned for updates!!