Land Use Change Consistently Reduces α- But Not β- and γ-Diversity of Bees.

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e.

Partitioning wild bee and hoverfly contributions to plant-pollinator network structure in fragmented habitats.

The risk of ecosystem function degradation with biodiversity loss has emerged as a major scientific concern in recent years. Possible relationships between taxonomic diversity and magnitude and stability of ecosystem processes build upon species' functional characteristics, which determine both susceptibility to environmental change and contribution to ecosystem properties. The functional diversity within communities thus provides a potential buffer against environmental disturbance, especially for properties emerging from interactions among species.

Past and potential future effects of habitat fragmentation on structure and stability of plant-pollinator and host-parasitoid networks.

Habitat fragmentation is a primary threat to biodiversity, but how it affects the structure and stability of ecological networks is poorly understood. Here, we studied plant-pollinator and host-parasitoid networks on 32 calcareous grassland fragments covering a size gradient of several orders of magnitude and with amounts of additional habitat availability in the surrounding landscape that varied independent of fragment size. We find that additive and interactive effects of habitat fragmentation at local (fragment size) and landscape scales (1,750 m radius) directly shape species communities by altering the number of interacting species and, indirectly, their body size composition.

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project.

The PREDICTS project-Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.

Predicting bee community responses to land-use changes: Effects of geographic and taxonomic biases.

Land-use change and intensification threaten bee populations worldwide, imperilling pollination services. Global models are needed to better characterise, project, and mitigate bees' responses to these human impacts. The available data are, however, geographically and taxonomically unrepresentative; most data are from North America and Western Europe, overrepresenting bumblebees and raising concerns that model results may not be generalizable to other regions and taxa.

Contrasting effects of mass-flowering crops on bee pollination of hedge plants at different spatial and temporal scales.

Landscape-wide mass-flowering of oilseed rape (canola Brassica napus) can considerably affect wild bee communities and pollination success of wild plants. We aimed to assess the impact of oilseed rape on the pollination of wild plants and bee abundance during and after oilseed-rape bloom, including effects on crop-noncrop spillover at landscape and adjacent-field scales. We focused on two shrub species (hawthorn Crataegus spp.