Assessing Climate Change Impacts on Island Bees: The Aegean Archipelago

Abstract

Pollinators’ climate change impact assessments focus mainly on mainland regions. Thus, we are unaware how island species might fare in a rapidly changing world. This is even more pressing in the Mediterranean Basin, a global biodiversity hotspot. In Greece, a regional pollinator hotspot, climate change research is in its infancy and the insect Wallacean shortfall still remains unaddressed. In a species distribution modelling framework, we used the most comprehensive occurrence database for bees in Greece to locate the bee species richness hotspots in the Aegean, and investigated whether these might shift in the future due to climate change and assessed the Natura 2000 protected areas network effectiveness. Range contractions are anticipated for most taxa, becoming more prominent over time. Species richness hotspots are currently located in the NE Aegean and in highly disturbed sites. They will shift both altitudinally and latitudinally in the future. A small proportion of these hotspots are currently included in the Natura 2000 protected areas network and this proportion is projected to decrease in the coming decades. There is likely an extinction debt present in the Aegean bee communities that could result to pollination network collapse. There is a substantial conservation gap in Greece regarding bees and a critical re-assessment of the established Greek protected areas network is needed, focusing on areas identified as bee diversity hotspots over time.

National records of 3000 European bee and hoverfly species: A contribution to pollinator conservation

“…Spain and France already have a National Pollinator Protection Plan set in place (MITECO, 2020; MTE‐MAA, 2021). The Greek fauna has been shown to be strongly threatened by global change and human activities, but the protection measures in place are not sufficient, currently covering only a small proportion of the endangered communities (Kougioumoutzis et al, 2022; Spiliopoulou et al, 2021). Italy faces a similar situation, with a substantial proportion of the pollinators being threatened by extinction (Bonelli et al, 2011; Quaranta et al, 2018).…”

wdpar: Interface to the World Database on Protected Areas

“…For example, it has been used to assess the performance of existing protected areas in Colombia, Greece, and South Asia (Chowdhury et al, 2021;Gonzalez et al, 2022;Kougioumoutzis et al, 2021;. It has also been used to examine the potential implications of climate change on conservation efforts (Kougioumoutzis et al, 2022;Mothes et al, 2020). Additionally, it has been used to account for existing protected areas when identifying priority areas for biodiversity conservation (J. O.…”

Assessing the Vulnerability of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants to Climate and Land-Use Changes in a Mediterranean Biodiversity Hotspot

“…Human impacts, particularly climate and land-use change (CC-LUC), pose significant threats to biodiversity, disproportionately affecting biodiversity Land 2024, 13, 133. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13020133 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land hotspots [6][7][8]. While accounting for many unique species, such hotspots are also areas where habitat loss occurs at alarming rates [9][10][11][12][13].…”