Atlantic flower-invertebrate interactions: A data set of occurrence and frequency of floral visits.

Encounters between flowers and invertebrates are key events for the functioning of tropical forests. Assessing the structure of networks composed by the interactions between those partners enables a better understanding of ecosystem functioning and the effects of environmental factors over ecological processes. Gathering such data is, however, costly and time-consuming, especially in the highly diverse tropics. We aimed to provide a comprehensive repository of the available flower-invertebrate interactions information for the Atlantic Forest, a South American tropical forest domain. Data were obtained from published works and "grey literature", such as theses and dissertations, as well as self-reports by co-authors. The data set has ~18 thousand interaction records forming 482 networks, each containing from 1 to 1,061 interaction links. Each network was sampled for about 200 hours or less, with few exceptions. A total of 641 plant genera within 136 different families and 39 orders were reported, with the most abundant and rich families being Asteraceae, Fabaceae and Rubiaceae. Invertebrates interacting with these plants were all arthropods from 10 orders, 129 families and 581 genera, comprising 2,419 morphotypes (including 988 named species). Hymenoptera was the most abundant and diverse order with at least six times more records than the second-ranked order (Lepidoptera). The complete data set shows Hymenoptera interacting with all plant orders, also depicting Diptera, Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, and Hemiptera as important nodes. Among plants, Asterales and Fabales had the highest number of interactions. The best sampled environment was forest (~8,000 records), followed by pastures and crops. Savanna, grasslands and urban environments (among others) were also reported, indicating a wide range of approaches dedicated to collect flower-invertebrate data in the Atlantic Forest domain. Nevertheless, most reported data were from forest understory or lower strata, indicating a knowledge gap about flower-invertebrate interactions at the canopy. Also, access to remote regions is still a limitation, generating sampling bias across the geographical range of the Atlantic Forest. Future studies in these continuous and hard to access forested areas shall bring important new information regarding the interactions between flowers and invertebrates at the Atlantic Forest. There are no copyright restrictions on the data set. Please cite this data paper if the data are used in publications and teaching events.