Climate change can affect the spatial association between stingless bees and Mimosa scabrella in the Brazilian Atlantic
- PDF / 687,432 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 467.716 x 680.315 pts Page_size
- 22 Downloads / 153 Views
Original article
Climate change can affect the spatial association between stingless bees and Mimosa scabrella in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest Cesar A. MARCHIORO1 , Valdeir P. LIMA1 , Cinara R. SALES2 1
Postgraduate Programme in Agricultural and Natural Ecosystems, Department of Agriculture, Biodiversity and Forests, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus Curitibanos, Curitibanos, Santa Catarina, Brazil 2 Bahia State University, Campus Barreiras, Barreiras, Bahia, Brazil Received 24 April 2019 – Revised 15 January 2020 – Accepted 21 February 2020
Abstract – The species-specific responses to climate change can result in discordant range shifts, leading to changes in associations among species. In this study, we tested whether climate change can affect the spatial association between the plant Mimosa scabrella and the stingless bees Melipona quadrifasciata anthidioides and M. quadrifasciata quadrifasciata . Ecological niche models were used to predict current and future species distributions using intermediate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Our models projected a pronounced reduction in climatically suitable habitats available for the studied species and identified a species-specific response to climate change. As a result, the models estimated a drastic reduction in the spatial association among species of up to 94% in the coming years, revealing that climate change may affect species interactions. biotic interaction / ecological niche modelling / Melipona / pollination / spatial association
1. INTRODUCTION The Earth’s climate is projected to exhibit relatively rapid changes in temperature and precipitation regimes throughout this century as a result of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities into the atmosphere (IPCC 2014; Knouft and Flicklin 2017). These changes may cause severe impacts on biological communities and ecosystem functioning (Pecl et al. 2017), considering that species are affected by climate in Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-020-00753-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Corresponding author: C. Marchioro, [email protected] Manuscript editor: Alexandra Klein
many ways such as changes in species distribution, relative abundance within species ranges and subtle shifts in activity timing and microhabitat use (Williams et al. 2008; Bates et al. 2014). In fact, there is a rich body of evidence showing that climate change is already impacting biodiversity through modifications in species richness and composition (Pecl et al. 2017). Given that species are unlikely to share identical sets of environmental requirements, the responses to a given combination of biotic and abiotic factors tend to be specific (Harrington et al. 1999). These specific responses to environmental factors can result in discordant range shifts in a climate change scenario, leading to phenological asynchrony and spatial mismatch among species that currently inte
Data Loading...
