Interaction between warming and landscape foraging resource availability on solitary bee reproduction

Abstract

More than three-quarters of the world's angiosperm plant species depend to some extent on animal-mediated pollination (Ollerton et al., 2011). Moreover, pollinators play a vital ecosystem service because they are essential for seed and fruit production of food crops (Klein et al., 2007). However, in the last decades, global change pressures (Goulson et al., 2015) such as climate change (Soroye et al., 2020) and landscape alteration (Garibaldi et al., 2011; Winfree et al., 2011) have caused pollinator declines (Bartomeus et al., 2019;Goulson et al., 2015). These global change pressures are not acting in isolation (Sala et al., 2000) and despite it is widely recognized that they might interact, few studies have explored these interactions experimentally in realistic field conditions (González-Varo et al., 2013).Most studies on the effect of global change on pollinators focus on social bees (i.e. stingless bees, bumblebees and honeybees; Colla & MacIvor, 2017;Sgolastra et al., 2019). However, bee pollinators are highly diverse, with more than 20,000 species all over the globe

Towards a system-level causative knowledge of pollinator communities

“…Under a lack of systematically controlled experiments, observational data from field studies or quasi-controlled experiments (where few factors may be controlled) can provide the raw material to understand the behaviour of a community. This behaviour comes in the form of a joint probability distribution P V over a set of relevant variables V. For example, studies may record any aspect of community composition as a function of a set of semi-controlled variables such as the presence (or density) of specific pollinators [21], their floral resources including both the identity of interacting plant species [22,23] and plant chemical composition [24][25][26], top-down regulators including pathogen [27] and predators [28], as well as several environmental variables such as temperature [13,29,30] or pesticide exposure [31,32]. These observational studies can be either for a specific period of time across different locations or measure pollinator communities repeatedly over time in order to capture a wider range of temporal conditions affecting pollinators' population trajectories [33,34].…”

Attractant spray enhances nesting preference and reduces macroparasite infestation of Osmia cornuta

“…The absence of an effect of the attractant on nesting performance can be attributed to the fact that ecological and resource variables are cancelled out in the paired setup. Indeed, nesting performance has been found to be multifaceted and influenced by factors such as landscape-level resources, material type, seasonal variation and the presence of macroparasites (Eeraerts et al, 2021(Eeraerts et al, , 2022Wittmann et al, 2023;Zaragoza-Trello et al, 2021). However, by isolating the effect of the attractant, I demonstrate that its impact on nesting preference is distinct from broader ecological drivers of performance.…”

Key tropical crops at risk from pollinator loss due to climate change and land use

“…First, we do not know if there is a mechanistic link between the interactive effects of land use and climate change on pollinator abundance. We reason that a significant interactive effect is at least likely, however, given prior localized studies demonstrating a synergistic effect of climate change and anthropogenic land use in insects (76,87). Second, we do not account for changes in the distribution of crops over time, which may occur because of direct effects of climate change, indirect feedbacks caused by pollinator losses, or other environmental or socioeconomic factors.…”