Drastic shifts in the Belgian bumblebee community over the last century
- PDF / 1,019,253 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 31 Downloads / 157 Views
(0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().,-volV)
ORIGINAL PAPER
Drastic shifts in the Belgian bumblebee community over the last century Orianne Rollin1,2,3 • Sarah Vray3,4,5 • Nicolas Dendoncker4 Denis Michez3 • Marc Dufreˆne2 • Pierre Rasmont3
•
Received: 19 June 2019 / Revised: 16 March 2020 / Accepted: 1 May 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Bumblebees are undergoing strong declines in Europe caused by habitat loss and fragmentation, agricultural intensification, and climate change. Long-term records are necessary to estimate population trends precisely and to propose appropriate mitigation strategies. Based on an original database of 173,788 specimens from museum collections, scientific monitoring, and opportunistic citizen data from 1810 to 2016, we compared changes in species richness and area of occupancy of Belgian bumblebee species through three time-periods (1910–1930, 1970–1989, and 1990–2016). We also assessed if the observed trends are related to species-specific ecological traits and spatial scales (local, regional and national). Overall, species richness decreased over the last century in Belgium, but some regions retained relatively species-rich communities. A strong shift in community composition occurred. Three species remained among the ‘‘top five’’ in terms of species occurrence (area of occupancy) between the three time-periods (B. pascuorum, B. lapidarius, and B. pratorum), but several species that were once widespread declined drastically (B. muscorum, B. humilis, B. ruderatus, and B. veteranus), while a few species increased their distribution (e.g. B. hypnorum and B. terrestris). Habitat preferences significantly explained the observed trends, with declining species preferring open habitats and increasing species preferring wooded habitats. Keywords Bombus Species richness change Area of occupancy Habitat preference Nesting strategy
Communicated by Louise Amy Ashton. Orianne Rollin and Sarah Vray contributed equally to the work. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-02001988-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Orianne Rollin [email protected] & Sarah Vray [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
123
Biodiversity and Conservation
Introduction Bumblebees (Bombus) are a diversified and common group of bee species found in temperate, alpine and arctic regions (Rasmont et al. 2015). They pollinate a wide diversity of crops and wild plant species (Ollerton et al. 2011). Many bumblebee species are undergoing a strong population decline in Western Europe and North America (Kosior et al. 2007; Goulson et al. 2010; Cameron et al. 2011; Nieto et al. 2014; Vray et al. 2019) caused by a shortage of floral resources, habitat loss and fragmentation, intensive use of agrochemicals and pesticides, with all three factors resulting primarily from the agricultural intensification seen during the second part of the twentieth century
Data Loading...
