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Declines in insect pollinators have been linked to a range of causative factors such as disease, loss of habitats, the quality and availability of food, and exposure to pesticides. Here, we analysed an extensive dataset generated from pesticide screening of foraging insects, pollen-nectar stores/beebread, pollen and ingested nectar across three species of bees collected at 128 European sites set in two types of crop. In this paper, we aimed to (i) derive a new index to summarise key aspects of complex pesticide exposure data and (ii) understand the links between pesticide exposures depicted by the different matrices, bee species and apple orchards versus oilseed rape crops. We found that summary indices were highly correlated with the number of pesticides detected in the related matrix but not with which pesticides were present. Matrices collected from apple orchards generally contained a higher number of pesticides (7.6 pesticides per site) than matrices from sites collected from oilseed rape crops (3.5 pesticides), with fungicides being highly represented in apple crops. A greater number of pesticides were found in pollen-nectar stores/beebread and pollen matrices compared with nectar and bee body matrices. Our results show that for a complete assessment of pollinator pesticide exposure, it is necessary to consider several different exposure routes and multiple species of bees across different agricultural systems.

There are substantial concerns about impaired honey bee health and colony losses due to several poorly understood factors. We used MALDI profiling (MALDI BeeTyping®) analysis to investigate how some environmental and management factors were related to the haemolymph peptidome (all peptides in the circulatory fluid), which reflects the immune status of Apis mellifera, under field conditions across Europe. Honey bees were exposed to varying environmental stressors across eight European countries totalling 128 agricultural sites, reflecting two different crop systems [oilseed rape (OSR) and apple (APP)]. Molecular signatures of haemolymph and the presence/absence of molecular-related ions of three immunity markers, namely the antimicrobial peptides (AMP) Apidaecin, Abaecin and Defensin-1, allowed discrimination of bee responses by country, crop type and site. However, many sites showed no significant signature related to the presence of AMP markers. Conversely, in Sweden (SWE), molecular ion intensities were very high, including those of the AMP markers. Even the lowest values were always higher than in other countries. Furthermore, all experimental sites in SWE expressed AMPs. A machine learning model was developed to discriminate the haemolymphs of bees from APP and OSR sites. The model was 90.6 % accurate in identifying the crop type from the samples used to build the model. Overall, MALDI BeeTyping® on individual bee haemolymph represents an attractive and promising “blood test” for monitoring the impact of stressors on bee health at the landscape scale, thus providing policymakers with new monitoring and regulatory tools.

Infectious and parasitic agents (IPAs) and their associated diseases are major environmental stressors that jeopardize bee health, both alone and in interaction with other stressors. Their impact on pollinator communities can be assessed by studying multiple sentinel bee species. Here, we analysed the field exposure of three sentinel managed bee species (Apis mellifera, Bombus terrestris and Osmia bicornis) to 11 IPAs (six RNA viruses, two bacteria, three microsporidia). The sentinel bees were deployed at 128 sites in eight European countries adjacent to either oilseed rape fields or apple orchards during crop bloom. Adult bees of each species were sampled before their placement and after crop bloom. The IPAs were detected and quantified using a harmonised, high-throughput and semi-automatized qPCR workflow. We describe differences among bee species in IPA profiles (richness, diversity, detection frequencies, loads and their change upon field exposure, and exposure risk), with no clear patterns related to the country or focal crop. Our results suggest that the most frequent IPAs in adult bees are more appropriate for assessing the bees’ IPA exposure risk. We also report positive correlations of IPA loads supporting the potential IPA transmission among sentinels, suggesting careful consideration should be taken when introducing managed pollinators in ecologically sensitive environments.

Sustainable agriculture requires balancing crop yields with the effects of pesticides on non-target organisms, such as bees and other crop pollinators. Field studies demonstrated that agricultural use of neonicotinoid insecticides can negatively affect wild bee species1,2, leading to restrictions on these compounds3. However, besides neonicotinoids, field-based evidence of the effects of landscape pesticide exposure on wild bees is lacking. Bees encounter many pesticides in agricultural landscapes4,5,6,7,8,9 and the effects of this landscape exposure on colony growth and development of any bee species remains unknown. Here we show that the many pesticides found in bumble bee-collected pollen are associated with reduced colony performance during crop bloom, especially in simplified landscapes with intensive agricultural practices. Our results from 316 Bombus terrestris colonies at 106 agricultural sites across eight European countries confirm that the regulatory system fails to sufficiently prevent pesticide-related impacts on non-target organisms, even for a eusocial pollinator species in which colony size may buffer against such impacts10,11. These findings support the need for postapproval monitoring of both pesticide exposure and effects to confirm that the regulatory process is sufficiently protective in limiting the collateral environmental damage of agricultural pesticide use.

Introduction: Survival and growth of tree seedlings are key processes of regeneration in forest ecosystems. However, little is known about how climate warming modulates seedling performance either directly or in interaction with understory vegetation and post-fire successional stages. Methods: We measured survival (over 3 years) and growth of seedlings of three tree species (Betula pubescens, Pinus sylvestris, and Picea abies) in a full-factorial field experiment with passive warming and removal of two plant functional groups (feather moss and/or ericaceous shrubs) along a post-fire chronosequence in an unmanaged boreal forest. Results: Warming had no effect on seedling survival over time or on relative biomass growth. Meanwhile, moss removal greatly increased seedling survival overall, while shrub removal canceled this effect for B. pubescens seedlings. In addition, B. pubescens and P. sylvestris survival benefitted most from moss removal in old forests (>260 years since last fire disturbance). In contrast to survival, seedling growth was promoted by shrub removal for two out of three species, i.e., P. sylvestris and P. abies, meaning that seedling survival and growth are governed by different understory functional groups affecting seedling performance through different mechanism and modes of action. Discussion: Our findings highlight that understory vegetation and to a lesser extent post-fire successional stage are important drivers of seedling performance while the direct effect of climate warming is not. This suggests that tree regeneration in future forests may be more responsive to changes in understory vegetation or fire regime, e.g., indirectly caused by warming, than to direct or interactive effects of rising temperatures.

To provide a complete portrayal of the multiple factors negatively impacting insects in agricultural landscapes it is necessary to assess the concurrent incidence, magnitude, and interactions among multiple stressors over substantial biogeographical scales. Trans-national ecological field investigations with wide-ranging stakeholders typically encounter numerous challenges during the design planning stages, not least that the scientific soundness of a spatially replicated study design must account for the substantial geographic and climatic variation among distant sites. ‘PoshBee’ (Pan-European assessment, monitoring, and mitigation of Stressors on the Health of Bees) is a multi-partner transdisciplinary agroecological project established to investigate the suite of stressors typically encountered by pollinating insects in European agricultural landscapes. To do this, PoshBee established a network of 128 study sites across eight European countries and collected over 50 measurements and samples relating to the nutritional, toxicological, pathogenic, and landscape components of the bees’ environment. This paper describes the development process, rationale, and end-result of each aspect of the of the PoshBee field investigation. We describe the main issues and challenges encountered during the design stages and highlight a number of actions or processes that may benefit other multi-partner research consortia planning similar large-scale studies. It was soon identified that in a multi-component study design process, the development of interaction and communication networks involving all collaborators and stakeholders requires considerable time and resources. It was also necessary at each planning stage to be mindful of the needs and objectives of all stakeholders and partners, and further challenges inevitably arose when practical limitations, such as time restrictions and labour constraints, were superimposed upon prototype study designs. To promote clarity for all sta

Apis mellifera is an important provider of ecosystem services, and during flight and foraging behaviour is exposed to environmental pollutants including airborne particulate matter (PM). While exposure to insecticides, antibiotics, and herbicides may compromise bee health through alterations of the gut microbial community, no data are available on the impacts of PM on the bee microbiota. Here we tested the effects of ultrapure Titanium dioxide (TiO2) submicrometric PM (i.e., PM1, less than 1 µm in diameter) on the gut microbiota of adult bees. TiO2 PM1 is widely used as a filler and whitening agent in a range of manufactured objects, and ultrapure TiO2 PM1 is also a common food additive, even if it has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as a possible human carcinogen in Group 2B. Due to its ubiquitous use, honey bees may be severely exposed to TiO2 ingestion through contaminated honey and pollen. Here, we demonstrated that acute and chronic oral administration of ultrapure TiO2 PM1 to adult bees alters the bee microbial community; therefore, airborne PM may represent a further risk factor for the honey bee health, promoting sublethal effects against the gut microbiota.

Current global change substantially threatens pollinators, which directly impacts the pollination services underpinning the stability, structure and functioning of ecosystems. Amongst these threats, many synergistic drivers, such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, increasing use of agrochemicals, decreasing resource diversity, as well as climate change, are known to affect wild and managed bees. Therefore, reliable indicators for pollinator sensitivity to such threats are needed. Biological traits, such as phenotype (e.g. shape, size and asymmetry) and storage reserves (e.g. fat body size), are important pollinator traits linked to reproductive success, immunity, resilience and foraging efficiency and, therefore, could serve as valuable markers of bee health and pollination service potential. This data paper contains an extensive dataset of wing morphology and fat body content for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) and the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) sampled at 128 sites across eight European countries in landscape gradients dominated by two major bee-pollinated crops (apple and oilseed rape), before and after focal crop bloom and potential pesticide exposure. The dataset also includes environmental metrics of each sampling site, namely landscape structure and pesticide use. The data offer the opportunity to test whether variation in the phenotype and fat bodies of bees is structured by environmental factors and drivers of global change. Overall, the dataset provides valuable information to identify which environmental threats predominantly contribute to the modification of these traits.

The biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate variability of the Antarctic continent and the Southern Ocean are major components of the whole Earth system. Antarctic ecosystems are driven more strongly by the physical environment than many other marine and terrestrial ecosystems. As a consequence, to understand ecological functioning, cross-disciplinary studies are especially important in Antarctic research. The conceptual study presented here is based on a workshop initiated by the Research Programme Antarctic Thresholds – Ecosystem Resilience and Adaptation of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, which focussed on challenges in identifying and applying cross-disciplinary approaches in the Antarctic. Novel ideas and first steps in their implementation were clustered into eight themes. These ranged from scale problems, through risk maps, and organism/ecosystem responses to multiple environmental changes and evolutionary processes. Scaling models and data across different spatial and temporal scales were identified as an overarching challenge. Approaches to bridge gaps in Antarctic research programmes included multi-disciplinary monitoring, linking biomolecular findings and simulated physical environments, as well as integrative ecological modelling. The results of advanced cross-disciplinary approaches can contribute significantly to our knowledge of Antarctic and global ecosystem functioning, the consequences of climate change, and to global assessments that ultimately benefit humankind.

NHM Repository

The impacts of human activities are more apparent at present in the sub-Antarctic than in the Antarctic. The sub-Antarctic islands, despite their physical isolation in the Southern Ocean, are generally more accessible, have less challenging climates, and a longer history of human presence than the more southern latitudes of the Peninsula and continent (Frenot et al. 2005; Selkirk 2007; Convey and Lebouvier 2009; Trathan and Reid 2009). Parts of the sub-Antarctic and Antarctica (in particular, the Peninsula and Scotia arc, including the South Shetland Islands) have experienced the most rapid rates of climate change in the Southern Hemisphere over recent decades (Convey et al. 2009a; Turner et al. 2009), and are receiving the highest contemporary rates of human visitation, associated with the fisheries industry, military, tourism, and scientific activities (Frenot et al. 2005; Lynch et al. 2010).

Some of the most rapidly changing ecosystems on our planet are located in the polar regions (IPCC 2007; Turner et al. 2009; SWIPA 2011). In some areas of the Arctic and Antarctic, atmospheric temperatures are rising at rates more than double the global average. In addition, there are other direct human impacts on polar regions such as pollution, exploitation and development. Polar ecosystems and the biodiversity they support are already responding to this change and it is expected that even more profound impacts will occur this century. Compounding the risk to polar biodiversity is the fact that many polar ecosystems have limited functional redundancy; in the event of the loss of a single keystone species, they may potentially be exposed to cascading effects and complete ecosystem restructuring (Post et al. 2009). Rapid climate change affecting the polar regions will also have profound physical and ecological consequences for the rest of the planet since the ice-covered Arctic Ocean, the Antarctic continent, and the globally significant Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) serve a key role in regulating the Earth’s climate and ocean systems. This special issue is intended to provide an overview of circumpolar change that crosses disciplines, systems, taxonomic groups and regions, and integrates papers that address a range of topics including: the monitoring of freshwater, marine, and terrestrial organisms in both the northern and southern polar regions, the role of protected areas in monitoring change in a warming world, polar resource management and development, impacts on northern indigenous peoples, case studies of the biodiversity of selected polar organisms, impacts of sea ice loss on terrestrial and marine organisms and ecosystems, interconnections with lower latitudes, and the influence of historical processes that have impacted polar diversity. This keynote paper is intended to provide background and insight into the issue by comparing and contrasting the Arc

Developments of future scenarios of Antarctic ecosystems are still in their infancy, whilst predictions of the physical environment are recognized as being of global relevance and corresponding models are under continuous development. However, in the context of environmental change simulations of the future of the Antarctic biosphere are increasingly demanded by decision makers and the public, and are of fundamental scientific interest. This paper briefly reviews existing predictive models applied to Antarctic ecosystems before providing a conceptual framework for the further development of spatially and temporally explicit ecosystem models. The concept suggests how to improve approaches to relating species’ habitat description to the physical environment, for which a case study on sea urchins is presented. In addition, the concept integrates existing and new ideas to consider dynamic components, particularly information on the natural history of key species, from physiological experiments and biomolecular analyses. Thereby, we identify and critically discuss gaps in knowledge and methodological limitations. These refer to process understanding of biological complexity, the need for high spatial resolution oceanographic data from the entire water column, and the use of data from biomolecular analyses in support of such ecological approaches. Our goal is to motivate the research community to contribute data and knowledge to a holistic, Antarctic-specific, macroecological framework. Such a framework will facilitate the integration of theoretical and empirical work in Antarctica, improving our mechanistic understanding of this globally influential ecoregion, and supporting actions to secure this biodiversity hotspot and its ecosystem services.

The Antarctic climate system varies on timescales from orbital, through millennial to sub-annual, and is closely coupled to other parts of the global climate system. We review these variations from the perspective of the geological and glaciological records and the recent historical period from which we have instrumental data (similar to the last 50 years). We consider their consequences for the biosphere, and show how the latest numerical models project changes into the future, taking into account human actions in the form of the release of greenhouse gases and chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. In doing so, we provide an essential Southern Hemisphere companion to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.

The Antarctic climate system varies on timescales from orbital, through millennial to sub-annual, and is closely coupled to other parts of the global climate system. We review these variations from the perspective of the geological and glaciological records and the recent historical period from which we have instrumental data (similar to the last 50 years). We consider their consequences for the biosphere, and show how the latest numerical models project changes into the future, taking into account human actions in the form of the release of greenhouse gases and chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. In doing so, we provide an essential Southern Hemisphere companion to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.

The Antarctic climate system varies on timescales from orbital, through millennial to sub-annual, and is closely coupled to other parts of the global climate system. We review these variations from the perspective of the geological and glaciological records and the recent historical period from which we have instrumental data (the last 50 years). We consider their consequences for the biosphere, and show how the latest numerical models project changes into the future, taking into account human actions in the form of the release of greenhouse gases and chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. In doing so, we provide an essential Southern Hemisphere companion to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Mill feed samples from six operating world-class Cu-Au low-grade deposits were collected along with the mill metallurgical results for the corresponding sample periods. The samples were subjected to laboratory flotation tests and Laplante gravity-recoverable gold (GRG) test, mineralogical assessment and cyanidation leaching. A new correlation of copper and gold recoveries was determined. Laboratory methods were developed for predicting both the relative Au:Cu flotation recovery ratio and the improvement in Au recovery to be expected from installing a gravity or combined gravity and flash flotation circuit. The analysis indicated that gravity circuits alone may have only marginal benefits for ores with gravity-recoverable gold values below 50% or gold size 80% below 75 micrometres; for such ores, other technologies such as flash flotation may be useful alone or in combination., Mill feed samples from six operating world-class Cu-Au low-grade deposits were collected along with the mill metallurgical results for the corresponding sample periods. The samples were subjected to laboratory flotation tests and Laplante gravity-recoverable gold (GRG) test, mineralogical assessment and cyanidation leaching. A new correlation of copper and gold recoveries was determined. Laboratory methods were developed for predicting both the relative Au:Cu flotation recovery ratio and the improvement in Au recovery to be expected from installing a gravity or combined gravity and flash flotation circuit. The analysis indicated that gravity circuits alone may have only marginal benefits for ores with gravity-recoverable gold values below 50% or gold size 80% below 75 micrometres; for such ores, other technologies such as flash flotation may be useful alone or in combination.

The temperature of the Southern Ocean has undergone an overall reduction from about 20 °C to −1.8 °C over the last 55–60 million years. To date, the Southern Ocean is characterized by low temperatures ranging from +3 °C close to the South Polar Frontal Zone to −1.86 °C in the vicinity of the Antarctic continent and a strong seasonality and patchiness of primary productivity.

Antarctic biologists frequently emphasize the differences between the modern Antarctic environment and its fauna, and aquatic habitats and faunas elsewhere in the world. While it is valid to portray Antarctica as remote and its fauna as endemic and cold adapted, this approach tends to obscure broad scale similarities between Antarctic and non-Antarctic faunas. For example, the Antarctic fish fauna shares an evolutionary response to its habitat with fish in some tropical, temperate and boreal lakes. In this review we compare some well studied lacustrine radiations of fish with the two radiations of marine fish in the Antarctic Region of the Southern Ocean, notothenioids and liparids. We shall first make the case that, unlike other marine habitats, the Antarctic Region fulfills most of the essential parameters of lakes containing radiations of fish and that this large component of the world ocean is equivalent to a closed basin. Therefore in spite of its vastness, the Antarctic Region provides a comparable opportunity for studying evolutionary biology within a confined area. It is likely that notothenioids, and possibly liparids, are the first known examples of species flocks or radiations of marine fish. Thus the high Antarctic shelf and upper slope is an insular evolutionary site, with endemic faunas equally as interesting, but less well known, as those in ancient lakes throughout the world.