Dataset Information

Response of wild bee diversity, abundance, and functional traits to vineyard inter-row management intensity and landscape diversity across Europe.

ABSTRACT: Agricultural intensification is a major driver of wild bee decline. Vineyards may be inhabited by plant and animal species, especially when the inter-row space is vegetated with spontaneous vegetation or cover crops. Wild bees depend on floral resources and suitable nesting sites which may be found in vineyard inter-rows or in viticultural landscapes. Inter-row vegetation is managed by mulching, tillage, and/or herbicide application and results in habitat degradation when applied intensively. Here, we hypothesize that lower vegetation management intensities, higher floral resources, and landscape diversity affect wild bee diversity and abundance dependent on their functional traits. We sampled wild bees semi-quantitatively in 63 vineyards representing different vegetation management intensities across Europe in 2016. A proxy for floral resource availability was based on visual flower cover estimations. Management intensity was assessed by vegetation cover (%) twice a year per vineyard. The Shannon Landscape Diversity Index was used as a proxy for landscape diversity within a 750 m radius around each vineyard center point. Wild bee communities were clustered by country. At the country level, between 20 and 64 wild bee species were identified. Increased floral resource availability and extensive vegetation management both affected wild bee diversity and abundance in vineyards strongly positively. Increased landscape diversity had a small positive effect on wild bee diversity but compensated for the negative effect of low floral resource availability by increasing eusocial bee abundance. We conclude that wild bee diversity and abundance in vineyards is efficiently promoted by increasing floral resources and reducing vegetation management frequency. High landscape diversity further compensates for low floral resources in vineyards and increases pollinating insect abundance in viticulture landscapes.

SUBMITTER: Kratschmer S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6467850 | biostudies-other | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Response of wild bee diversity, abundance, and functional traits to vineyard inter-row management intensity and landscape diversity across Europe.

Kratschmer Sophie S Pachinger Bärbel B Schwantzer Martina M Paredes Daniel D Guzmán Gema G Goméz José A JA Entrenas José A JA Guernion Muriel M Burel Françoise F Nicolai Annegret A Fertil Albin A Popescu Daniela D Macavei Laura L Hoble Adela A Bunea Claudiu C Kriechbaum Monika M Zaller Johann G JG Winter Silvia S

Ecology and evolution 20190312 7

Agricultural intensification is a major driver of wild bee decline. Vineyards may be inhabited by plant and animal species, especially when the inter-row space is vegetated with spontaneous vegetation or cover crops. Wild bees depend on floral resources and suitable nesting sites which may be found in vineyard inter-rows or in viticultural landscapes. Inter-row vegetation is managed by mulching, tillage, and/or herbicide application and results in habitat degradation when applied intensively. He ...[more]

PMID: 31015991

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Project description:Bee populations and other pollinators face multiple, synergistically acting threats, which have led to population declines, loss of local species richness and pollination services, and extinctions. However, our understanding of the degree, distribution and causes of declines is patchy, in part due to inadequate monitoring systems, with the challenge of taxonomic identification posing a major logistical barrier. Pollinator conservation would benefit from a high-throughput identification pipeline.We show that the metagenomic mining and resequencing of mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomics) can be applied successfully to bulk samples of wild bees. We assembled the mitogenomes of 48 UK bee species and then shotgun-sequenced total DNA extracted from 204 whole bees that had been collected in 10 pan-trap samples from farms in England and been identified morphologically to 33 species. Each sample data set was mapped against the 48 reference mitogenomes.The morphological and mitogenomic data sets were highly congruent. Out of 63 total species detections in the morphological data set, the mitogenomic data set made 59 correct detections (93·7% detection rate) and detected six more species (putative false positives). Direct inspection and an analysis with species-specific primers suggested that these putative false positives were most likely due to incorrect morphological IDs. Read frequency significantly predicted species biomass frequency (R2 = 24·9%). Species lists, biomass frequencies, extrapolated species richness and community structure were recovered with less error than in a metabarcoding pipeline.Mitogenomics automates the onerous task of taxonomic identification, even for cryptic species, allowing the tracking of changes in species richness and distributions. A mitogenomic pipeline should thus be able to contain costs, maintain consistently high-quality data over long time series, incorporate retrospective taxonomic revisions and provide an auditable evidence trail. Mitogenomic data sets also provide estimates of species counts within samples and thus have potential for tracking population trajectories.

Project description:Wild bees are threatened by multiple interacting stressors, such as habitat loss, land use change, parasites, and pathogens. However, vineyards with vegetated inter-rows can offer high floral resources within viticultural landscapes and provide foraging and nesting habitats for wild bees. Here, we assess how vineyard management regimes (organic vs. conventional; inter-row vegetation management) and landscape composition determine the inter-row plant and wild bee assemblages, as well as how these variables relate to functional traits in 24 Austrian and 10 South African vineyards. Vineyards had either permanent vegetation cover in untilled inter-rows or temporary vegetation cover in infrequently tilled inter-rows. Proportion of seminatural habitats (e.g., fallows, grassland, field margins) and woody structures (e.g., woodlots, single trees, tree rows) were used as proxies for landscape composition and mapped within 500-m radius around the study vineyards. Organic vineyard management increased functional richness (FRic) of wild bees and flowering plants, with woody structures marginally increasing species richness and FRic of wild bees. Wild bee and floral traits were differently associated across the countries. In Austria, several bee traits (e.g., lecty, pollen collection type, proboscis length) were associated with flower color and symmetry, while in South African vineyards, only bees' proboscis length was positively correlated with floral traits characteristic of Asteraceae flowers (e.g., ray-disk morphology, yellow colors). Solitary bee species in Austria benefitted from infrequent tillage, while ground nesting species preferred inter-rows with undisturbed soils. Higher proportions of woody structures in surrounding landscapes resulted in less solitary and corbiculate bees in Austria, but more aboveground nesting species in South Africa. In both countries, associations between FRic of wild bees and flowering plants were positive both in organic and in conventional vineyards. We recommend the use of diverse cover crop seed mixtures to enhance plant flowering diversity in inter-rows, to increase wild bee richness in viticultural landscapes.

Project description:BackgroundWild bees are important pollinators that have declined in diversity and abundance during the last decades. Habitat destruction and fragmentation associated with urbanization are reported as part of the main causes of this decline. Urbanization involves dramatic changes of the landscape, increasing the proportion of impervious surface while decreasing that of green areas. Few studies have investigated the effects of urbanization on bee communities. We assessed changes in the abundance, species richness, and composition of wild bee community along an urbanization gradient.Methodology/principal findingsOver two years and on a monthly basis, bees were sampled with colored pan traps and insect nets at 24 sites located along an urbanization gradient. Landscape structure within three different radii was measured at each study site. We captured 291 wild bee species. The abundance of wild bees was negatively correlated with the proportion of impervious surface, while species richness reached a maximum at an intermediate (50%) proportion of impervious surface. The structure of the community changed along the urbanization gradient with more parasitic species in sites with an intermediate proportion of impervious surface. There were also greater numbers of cavity-nesting species and long-tongued species in sites with intermediate or higher proportion of impervious surface. However, urbanization had no effect on the occurrence of species depending on their social behavior or body size.Conclusions/significanceWe found nearly a third of the wild bee fauna known from France in our study sites. Indeed, urban areas supported a diverse bee community, but sites with an intermediate level of urbanization were the most speciose ones, including greater proportion of parasitic species. The presence of a diverse array of bee species even in the most urbanized area makes these pollinators worthy of being a flagship group to raise the awareness of urban citizens about biodiversity.

Dataset Information

Response of wild bee diversity, abundance, and functional traits to vineyard inter-row management intensity and landscape diversity across Europe.

Publications

Response of wild bee diversity, abundance, and functional traits to vineyard inter-row management intensity and landscape diversity across Europe.

Similar Datasets

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