Plant-pollinator interactions in changing landscapes

WILLIAMS NEAL; CRONE ELIZABETH; WINFREE RACHAEL; AGUILAR RAMIRO; ROULSTON TAI; PACKER LAURENCE; POTTS SIMON; MINCKLEY ROBERT

Durban, South Africa

Simposio; XXIII International Congress of Entomology; 2008

Entomological Society of Southern Africa

The loss and degradation of habitat resulting from human activities are among the greatest threats to biological diversity and to the ecological interactions and functions that depend on this diversity. Pollination is one such function that is a critical to plant and animal persistence,and which increases with the diversity and abundance of pollinators in the community. The tendency has been to consider natural habitats as good for pollinators and human-altered habitats as uniformly bad; however, recent studies call this generalization into question. Weused a formal meta-analysis and hierarchical modelling to test the responses of native bee communities to different landscape changes and other anthropogenic disturbances. The meta-analysis revealed that habitat loss and fragmentation negatively affect abundance anddiversity. Response to other disturbance types was variable, in part due to limited samples.The more detailed hierarchical model allows us to explore whether functional-traits help explain responses of bees within and among disturbance types. Here we define functional trait groups as species with similar life histories (social vs. social), nesting strategies, bodysizes, or trophic specialization. Preliminary results from different studies show that general nesting habit (e.g., ground-nesting vs. twig-nesting) and sociality can determine sensitivity todifferent land use changes. Less is known about the role of other functional traits.