Urbanization Affects Composition but Not Richness of Flower Visitors in the Yungas of Argentina
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Urbanization Affects Composition but Not Richness of Flower Visitors in the Yungas of Argentina AA AMADO DE SANTIS1,2, NP CHACOFF3,4 1
Centro de Estudios Territoriales Ambientales y Sociales (CETAS-UNJu), Jujuy, Argentina Instituto de Ecorregiones Andinas (INECOA), Universidad Nacional de Jujuy - CONICET, Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, S. S. de Jujuy, Argentina 3 Instituto de Ecología Regional (CONICET-UNT), Universidad Nacional de Tucumán (UNT), Tucumán, Argentina 4 Facultad de Ciencias Naturales e Instituto Miguel Lillo, Univ Nacional de Tucumán (UNT), Tucumán, Argentina 2
Keywords Urban ecology, flower-visitor assembly, bee traits, Jujuy province Correspondence A.A. Amado De Santis, Instituto de Ecorregiones Andinas (INECOA), Universidad Nacional de Jujuy - CONICET, Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, S. S. de Jujuy, Argentina; aleamado_2@hotmail. com Edited by Márcia M Maués – Embrapa Received 24 September 2019 and accepted 12 March 2020 * Sociedade Entomológica do Brasil 2020
Abstract Urban areas represent a spatially small impact in relation to other landuses such as livestock and agriculture, but they undergo rapid changes. Such changes involve their size, shape, interconnectivity, and composition of natural patches. Habitat loss generated by urbanization affects the diversity and abundance of bees and other flower visitors in many sites. In general, the presence of urban areas represents a strict boundary to flower visitors and restricts their movement between natural and suburban habitat patches. The aim of this work is to evaluate how the flower visitor assemblage change along an urban-natural gradient in northwest Argentina. We established five areas in the Yungas ecoregion and sampled three sites with different degrees of urbanization (urban, suburban, and natural), at each area, reaching 15 sites. At each site, we sampled flower visitors during 5-min observation periods done over flowering plants. We found 197 morphospecies of flower-visiting insects along the gradient and an invariant richness, abundance, and Shannon diversity. The assemblage presented the same taxonomic group distributions in the three categories established. However, in urban sites, solitary bees and bees with soil borrowing nesting type predominate, while eusocial and cavity nesting bees were the main flower visitors in suburban sites. Our results suggest that the cities of northwestern Argentina are not a strict boundary for flower visitors; however, urbanization seems to be selecting and favoring certain flower-visitor species traits.
Introduction Urban areas represent a spatially small impact in relation to other land-uses such as livestock and agriculture, but they undergo fast changes (Ellis et al 2010). The current human population growth and associated migration from rural to more urbanized areas could derive in the transformation of 5.87 million square kilometers to urban areas in 2030 (Seto et al 2012). Urbanization is in general associated with negative impacts such as the loss, fragmentation, isolatio
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