Phenological Floral Resource Complementarity is Important for Bee Abundance

agroecosystem;coffee;bees;biodiversity;Natural Resources and Environment

Fisher, KaleighHunter, Mark ;

University of Michigan

关键词: agroecosystem;    coffee;    bees;    biodiversity;    Natural Resources and Environment;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/122456/Kaleigh_Fisher_thesis_2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Spatial resource heterogeneity has been found to greatly influence the dynamicsbetween diversity and function. This is particularly relevant for bee diversity andpollination services. While there has been ample research conducted to investigate thesepatterns, the impact of phenological resource heterogeneity (differences in availability ofresources throughout time) on biodiversity and functioning has been less explored. Thisis important in agricultural systems, as many foraging periods of bees extend beyond thecrop flowering event. In this study, we sought to understand how the bee communitychanged between seasons and if phenological complementarity of non-crop floralresources influenced bee diversity and abundance. We explored these questions in aregion dominated by coffee agroecosystems in Mexico. This region was an ideal systemfor this study because the landscape offers a range of coffee management regimes thatmaintain heterogeneity in floral resource availability temporally and spatially.We found that the bee community varies significantly between the seasons. Therewere a greater proportion of native social bees in the rainy season than the dry season.The proportion of solitary bees did not vary between the seasons. Managed social beeshad a significantly greater proportion in the dry season when coffee was flowering thanall other sampling times. Additionally, we found that floral resources from groundcover,but not trees, were associated with bee abundance. However, the phenological scale ofthe availability of these resources is important, whereby contemporaneous resourceavailability appears particularly important in maintaining high bee abundance at siteswith lower phenological complementarity through time. We argue that in additional tospatial resource heterogeneity, resource heterogeneity through time is also critical in explaining patterns in the bee community. Farms can support pollinator services andconservation by maintaining complementarity in floral resources available from both cropand non-crop plants.