Plant species abundance is partly determined by reproductive success and the factors that limit this success. We studied the flowering phenology, breeding systems and florivory in a community of seven epiphytic Tillandsia spp. in a tropical dry forest in central Mexico. Flowering periods were distributed throughout the year, and corolla sizes suggested that most species share pollinators. The most common breeding system was self‐incompatibility (Tillandsia achyrostachys, T. caput‐medusae and T. hubertiana), T. lydiae was infertile, T. circinnatioides was partially self‐compatible and T. recurvata and T. schiedeana were self‐compatible with high autonomous self‐pollination. Floral morphology suggests that delayed selfing occurs in the autonomous self‐pollinated species, and separation between stigma and stamens could result in self‐pollination in the remaining species being avoided. Less than 5% of the inflorescences in the most abundant species (T. recurvata) suffered damage by florivores, but > 40% of inflorescences were damaged in the other species. In damaged inflorescences, fruit set decreased by up to 89%. Our data show that the dominant species (T. recurvata) is autogamous and its reproductive success is slightly reduced by resource constraints and florivory. In the less abundant species, resource limitation and florivory dramatically reduced reproductive success, but the strength of these limiting factors is season dependent. © 2014 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2015, 177, 50–65.

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Global climate change is expected to affect temperature and precipitation patterns worldwide, which in turn is likely to affect insect phenology, distribution and diversity. To improve our understanding of such processes, it is important to understand how insects may respond to changes in seasonality, and how these affect their activity, patterns of distribution and species richness. The tropical dry forest (TDF) is a highly seasonal ecosystem, for which two seasons are commonly described (rainy and dry) and there is a lack of information on the combined effect of both precipitation and temperature on the insect communities. In order to evaluate the seasonal patterns in the community of Cerambycidae in a TDF, historical climatic variables were obtained, and an annual sampling of the family was carried out, using three collection techniques. We found that the Cerambycidae family showed a more complex response to climate, than simply the rainy and dry season of the year. The relationship between diversity and composition of cerambycids with changes in temperature and precipitation showed four seasonal communities which were synchronized with phenological processes of the TDF. Climate change could reduce biodiversity, causing seasonal patterns to lose complexity, either because the climatic characteristics of a season disappear and/or because the duration of a season expands, these changes will modify the ecological processes of the TDF, since they would generate changes in the flora and fauna associated with the different seasons.

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Question:The distribution and interactions of terrestrial biodiversity are influenced by environmental gradients. In general, tropical species present a hump-shaped altitudinal species richness pattern related to gradients of temperature and precipitation. However, the effects of the elevational and environmental gradients on the co-occurrence of species that form specialized mutualisms in the lowland tropical forest canopy and the relative importance of these species in interaction networks are unknown. We studied ant-gardens, which are constituted by vascular epiphytes that inhabit ant nests exclusively. Our main question was: do the vegetation type, elevation, temperature, and precipitation alter the diversity and interactions of the associated species in ant-gardens?Location: Southeastern Mexico. Methods:We recorded epiphytes and ants associated with ant-gardens in 21 sites in southeastern Mexico (elevational range of 23-643 m a.s.l.), which is located on the northern limit of the distribution of Neotropical ant-gardens. We tested whether the vegetation type and gradients of elevation, temperature and precipitation influence the diversity (richness and composition) and interactions (centrality, i.e., relative importance of each species in epiphyte-epiphyte interaction networks) of the ant-gardens. Results:We found a total of 126 ant-gardens formed by 15 epiphyte species and two ant species. Seven epiphytes and only one ant (Azteca gnava) are specialists of antgardens (true ant-garden epiphyte and ant species respectively). Neither vegetation type nor elevational and environmental gradients influenced the richness, composition and centrality of the epiphytes, although some species only occurred in sites with greater precipitation. The true ant-garden epiphytes were more central than the non-true ant-garden epiphytes, with the orchid Epidendrum flexuosum being the most frequent and central epiphytic species in Mexican ant-gardens.Conclusions: Unlike guilds of epiphytes and ants considered individually, the antgardens represent a mutualism that maintains their patterns of diversity and interspecific interactions along gradients of elevation, temperature and precipitation.