Cattle grazing results in greater floral resources and pollinators than sheep grazing in low-diversity grasslands.

Land-use and land-cover change associated with agriculture is one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. In heavily modified agricultural landscapes, grazing lands may be the only areas that can provide essential resources for native grassland species. Management decisions, such as choice of livestock species, affect the extent to which grazing lands provide suitable habitat for native species such as pollinators.

Cattle and sheep differentially alter floral resources and the native bee communities in working landscapes.

Within agricultural landscapes, native bees often rely on limited natural and seminatural lands to provide the majority of the food and nesting resources that sustain them. To understand better how management can affect pollinators in these seminatural areas, we compared how sheep or cattle herbivory influenced floral resources and bee communities in low-diversity, former Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pastures managed with patch-burn grazing. We sampled bee communities and floral resources three times per season in 2017, 2018, and 2019.