Journal Club Article for April 9, 2021

This Fri­day, April 9, 2021, from 12–1pm, we will dis­cuss the linked arti­cle at our next week­ly Jour­nal Club meet­ing. The arti­cle is titled “Wild bees as win­ners and losers: Rel­a­tive impacts of land­scape com­po­si­tion, qual­i­ty, and cli­mate”, and will be pre­sent­ed by STEM Research intern Matthew Healy.

Abstract: Wild bees, like many oth­er taxa, are threat­ened by land-use and cli­mate change, which, in turn, jeop­ar­dizes pol­li­na­tion of crops and wild plants. Under­stand­ing how land-use and cli­mate fac­tors inter­act is crit­i­cal to pre­dict­ing and man­ag­ing pol­li­na­tor pop­u­la­tions and ensur­ing ade­quate pol­li­na­tion ser­vices, but most stud­ies have eval­u­at­ed either land-use or cli­mate effects, not both. Fur­ther­more, bee species are incred­i­bly vari­able, span­ning an array of behav­ioral, phys­i­o­log­i­cal, and life-his­to­ry traits that can increase or decrease resilience to land-use or cli­mate change. Thus, there are like­ly bee species that ben­e­fit, while oth­ers suf­fer, from chang­ing cli­mate and land use, but few stud­ies have doc­u­ment­ed tax­on-spe­cif­ic trends. To address these crit­i­cal knowl­edge gaps, we ana­lyzed a long-term dataset of wild bee occur­rences from Mary­land, Delaware, and Wash­ing­ton DC, USA, exam­in­ing how dif­fer­ent bee gen­era and func­tion­al groups respond to land­scape com­po­si­tion, qual­i­ty, and cli­mate fac­tors. Despite a large body of lit­er­a­ture doc­u­ment­ing land-use effects on wild bees, in this study, cli­mate fac­tors emerged as the main dri­vers of wild-bee abun­dance and rich­ness. For wild-bee com­mu­ni­ties in spring and summer/fall, tem­per­a­ture and pre­cip­i­ta­tion were more impor­tant pre­dic­tors than land­scape com­po­si­tion, land­scape qual­i­ty, or topog­ra­phy. How­ev­er, rela­tion­ships var­ied sub­stan­tial­ly between wild-bee gen­era and func­tion­al groups. In the North­east USA, past trends and future pre­dic­tions show a chang­ing cli­mate with warmer win­ters, more intense pre­cip­i­ta­tion in win­ter and spring, and longer grow­ing sea­sons with high­er max­i­mum tem­per­a­tures. In almost all of our analy­ses, these con­di­tions were asso­ci­at­ed with low­er abun­dance of wild bees. Wild-bee rich­ness results were more mixed, includ­ing neu­tral and pos­i­tive rela­tion­ships with pre­dict­ed tem­per­a­ture and pre­cip­i­ta­tion pat­terns. Thus, in this region and undoubt­ed­ly more broad­ly, chang­ing cli­mate pos­es a sig­nif­i­cant threat to wild-bee communities.

https://massasoit.zoom.us/my/stemresearch

Meet­ing ID: 549 554 5262

Mas­sas­oit STEM events are open to ALL Mas­sas­oit stu­dents, fac­ul­ty, and staff.

Mas­sas­oit Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege encour­ages per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties to par­tic­i­pate in its pro­grams and activ­i­ties. If you antic­i­pate need­ing any type of accom­mo­da­tion or have ques­tions relat­ed to access for this event, please con­tact the Divi­sion of Sci­ence and Math­e­mat­ics at sciencemath@massasoit.edu in advance of your par­tic­i­pa­tion or vis­it.

Pho­to by Wolf­gang Has­sel­mann on Unsplash