1. Heat and desiccation tolerances predict bee abundance under climate change.
- Author
-
Kazenel MR, Wright KW, Griswold T, Whitney KD, and Rudgers JA
- Subjects
- Bees, Animals, Climate Change, Desiccation, Insecta, Pollination physiology, Ecosystem, Hot Temperature
- Abstract
Climate change could pose an urgent threat to pollinators, with critical ecological and economic consequences. However, for most insect pollinator species, we lack the long-term data and mechanistic evidence that are necessary to identify climate-driven declines and predict future trends. Here we document 16 years of abundance patterns for a hyper-diverse bee assemblage
1 in a warming and drying region2 , link bee declines with experimentally determined heat and desiccation tolerances, and use climate sensitivity models to project bee communities into the future. Aridity strongly predicted bee abundance for 71% of 665 bee populations (species × ecosystem combinations). Bee taxa that best tolerated heat and desiccation increased the most over time. Models forecasted declines for 46% of species and predicted more homogeneous communities dominated by drought-tolerant taxa, even while total bee abundance may remain unchanged. Such community reordering could reduce pollination services, because diverse bee assemblages typically maximize pollination for plant communities3 . Larger-bodied bees also dominated under intermediate to high aridity, identifying body size as a valuable trait for understanding how climate-driven shifts in bee communities influence pollination4 . We provide evidence that climate change directly threatens bee diversity, indicating that bee conservation efforts should account for the stress of aridity on bee physiology., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)- Published
- 2024
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