Bumble bees (Bombus spp.) are important pollinators, yet rapidly declining globally. In North America some species are thriving while others are nearing extinction. Recognizing subtle differences in species’ biology and responses to environmental factors is required to illuminate key threats and to understand their different population trajectories. We intensively surveyed bumble bees in Ohio, USA, along the receding southern boundary of many species’ ranges, to evaluate current conservation status of the state’s species. In 318 90-min field surveys across two consecutive years we observed 23,324 bumble bees of 10 species visiting 170 plant species. Habitat, landscape, latitude, and their interactions significantly influenced bumble bee abundance, species richness, and community composition during peak season. Sites planted with flowers yielded more bumble bee individuals and species than did sites not planted with bee food plants. Bombus impatiens, B. griseocollis, and B. bimaculatus comprised 93% of all observations. Their abundances all peaked in habitats planted with wildflowers, but there were species-specific responses to local and landscape factors. Three less common species (B. fervidus, B. vagans, and B. perplexus) were more likely to be found in forested landscapes, particularly in the northeastern portion of the state. Bombus perplexus was also affiliated with planted urban wildflower patches. These results provide a strong starting point for future monitoring and conservation intervention that targets less common species. A quantitative synthesis of detailed state-level and regional datasets would allow additional insight into broad scale patterns of diversity in bumble bee communities and species conservation trajectories.

Wildfire can drastically affect plant sexual reproductive success in plant–pollinator systems. We assessed plant reproductive success of wind, generalist and specialist pollinated plant species along paired unburned, burned-edge and burned-interior locations of large wildfires in the Mojave Desert. Flower production of wind and generalist pollinated plants was greater in burned landscapes than adjacent unburned areas, whereas specialist species responses were more neutral. Fruit production of generalist species was greater in burned landscapes than in unburned areas, whereas fruit production of wind- and specialist-pollinated species showed no difference in burned and unburned landscapes. Plants surviving in wildfire-disturbed landscapes did not show evidence of pollination failure, as measured by fruit set and seed:ovule ratios. Generalist- and specialist-plant species established in the interior of burned landscapes showed no difference in fruit production than plants established on burned edges suggesting that pollination services are conserved with increasing distance from fire boundaries in burned desert landscapes. Stimulation of plant reproduction in burned environments due to competition release may contribute to the maintenance of pollinator services and re-establishment of the native plant community in post-fire desert environments.

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Abstract. Improving science literacy in the general public has become increasingly important to ecologists. Although many scientists are involved in outreach, most of the public depends on mass media sources to learn about original scientific research. In this study, we explore how ecological findings are portrayed in the mass media. To do so, we survey media coverage of scientific articles published in the journal Ecology over the past decade. We find that relatively few scientific articles-less than 2% of the total published papers-receive any media coverage. Newspapers constitute the primary medium for ecological findings, followed closely by newswire, and distantly by newsletters, magazines, and online web publications; no ecological findings are reported in television or radio during the timeframe we examined. We also examine which components of scientific publications are covered in news stories, focusing on five categories: theory, methods, results, discussion, and background science not coming directly from the scientific paper. Considerable coverage in media stories (about one-fourth of media story content) focuses on the results of the paper; interestingly, just over a third of media story content covers discussion material, followed closely by theory at 17%. We conclude that although relatively few Ecology articles are covered in the mass media, those that are tend to focus on the implications of scientific research and on actual scientific findings. Finally, Ecology articles covered in mainstream media were not cited more or less frequently by scientists than those not covered in mainstream media. That is, journalists appear to feature an average spectrum of academic work, rather than articles that ultimately become most highly cited in the ecological field.

Plant–pollinator interactions represent a crucial ecosystem function threatened by anthropogenic landscape changes. Disturbances that reduce plant diversity are associated with floral resource and pollinator declines. Establishing wildflower plantings is a major conservation strategy targeting pollinators, the success of which depends on long‐term persistence of seeded floral communities. However, most pollinator‐oriented seeding projects are monitored for a few years, making it difficult to evaluate the longevity of such interventions. Selecting plant species to provide pollinators diverse arrays of floral resources throughout their activity season is often limited by budgetary constraints and other conservation priorities. To evaluate the long‐term persistence of prairie vegetation seeded to support pollinators, we sowed wildflower seed mixes into plots on a degraded reclaimed strip‐mine landscape in central Ohio, USA. We examined how pollinator habitat quality, measured as floral abundance and diversity, changed over 10 years (2009–2019) in the absence of management, over the course of the blooming season within each year, and across three seed mixes containing different numbers and combinations of flowering plant species. Seeded species floral abundance declined by more than 75% over the study, with the largest decline occurring between the fifth and seventh summers. Native and non‐native adventive flowering plants quickly colonized the plots and represented >50% of floral community abundances on average. Floral richness remained relatively constant throughout the study, with a small peak one year after plot establishment. Plots seeded with High‐Diversity Mixes averaged two or three more species per plot compared with a Low‐Diversity Mix, despite having been seeded with twice as many plant species. Within years, the abundance and diversity of seeded species were lowest early in the blooming season and increased monotonically from June to August. Adventive species exhibited the opposite trend, such that complementary abundance patterns of seeded and adventive species blooms resulted in a relatively constant floral abundance across the growing season. Seeded plant communities followed classic successional patterns in which annual species quickly established and flowered but were replaced by perennial species after the first few summers. Long‐term data on establishment and persistence of flower species can guide species selection for future‐oriented pollinator habitat restorations.

Regionally specific flower preference data are needed to optimize conservation habitat plantings for at-risk pollinators such as bumble bees (Bombus spp.).Current tools for selecting flowers for plantings rely on raw bee flower visits, which can be biased toward abundant flowers. To assist in planning habitat enhancements for bumble bees, we quantified genus-and species-level floral preferences using a selection index that accounts for floral availability. Through 477 h of observation in Ohio, USA during the summers of 2017 and 2018, we recorded 22,999 observations of eight Bombus species visiting 96 flowering plant taxa. As a genus, Bombus selected flowers nonrandomly; the most strongly preferred plants included Asclepias spp., Cirsium spp., Convolvulaceae, Dipsacus spp., Echinacea purpurea, Monarda fistulosa, Penstemon digitalis, and Silphium spp. Only a few Fabaceae were highly selected (Baptisia spp., Trifolium pratense, and Vicia spp.), while some were preferred only during their peak bloom (Securigera varia), and others were not preferred by bumble bees (T. hybridum and Melilotus spp.). Diets differed among habitats, and in restored meadows, bumble bees selected for native planted species such as Monarda fistulosa, Asclepias syriaca, Echinacea purpurea, Penstemon digitalis, and Silphium spp. Diets and preferences shifted over the season, largely driven by changes in plant phenologies (e.g., in June, Penstemon was strongly selected, in July, Asclepias, and in August, Verbena). For the three most common Bombus (B. impatiens, B. griseocollis, and B. bimaculatus), rarefaction analysis indicates that we were able to detect almost all plants in their summer diets. However, for five less common species, even our extensive sampling was insufficient to fully characterize their diets. The common Bombus species differed in their feeding niches, perhaps reducing interspecific competition. In contrast, we found high diet overlap between three rarer species-B. vagans, B. fervidus, and B. pensylvanicus, suggesting that these at-risk species might benefit from different floral communities than would the common species. Five of eight species