Heat and desiccation tolerances predict bee abundance under climate change.

Climate change could pose an urgent threat to pollinators, with critical ecological and economic consequences. However, for most insect pollinator species, we lack the long-term data and mechanistic evidence that are necessary to identify climate-driven declines and predict future trends. Here we document 16 years of abundance patterns for a hyper-diverse bee assemblage in a warming and drying region, link bee declines with experimentally determined heat and desiccation tolerances, and use climate sensitivity models to project bee communities into the future.

Crop and Semi-Natural Habitat Configuration Affects Diversity and Abundance of Native Bees (Hymenoptera: Anthophila) in a Large-Field Cotton Agroecosystem.

The cotton agroecosystem is one of the most intensely managed, economically and culturally important fiber crops worldwide, including in the United States of America (U.S.), China, India, Pakistan, and Brazil.

Landscape Effects on Native Bees (Hymenoptera: Anthophila) Captured in Pheromone Traps for Noctuid Crop Pests (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae).

Noctuid pests, including tobacco budworm (Chloridea virescens (Fab.)) and bollworm (Helicoverpa zea (Boddie)), are significant pests of southern row crops including cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.), corn (Zea mays L.

Bee species checklist of the San Francisco Peaks, Arizona.

Background: Here we present a checklist of the bee species found on the C. Hart Merriam elevation gradient along the San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona. Elevational gradients can serve as natural proxies for climate change, replacing time with space as they span multiple vegetation zones over a short geographic distance.

Predicting changes in bee assemblages following state transitions at North American dryland ecotones.

Drylands worldwide are experiencing ecosystem state transitions: the expansion of some ecosystem types at the expense of others. Bees in drylands are particularly abundant and diverse, with potential for large compositional differences and seasonal turnover across ecotones. To better understand how future ecosystem state transitions may influence bees, we compared bee assemblages and their seasonality among sites at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge (NM, USA) that represent three dryland ecosystem types (and two ecotones) of the southwestern U.

Detecting insect pollinator declines on regional and global scales.

Recently there has been considerable concern about declines in bee communities in agricultural and natural habitats. The value of pollination to agriculture, provided primarily by bees, is >$200 billion/year worldwide, and in natural ecosystems it is thought to be even greater. However, no monitoring program exists to accurately detect declines in abundance of insect pollinators; thus, it is difficult to quantify the status of bee communities or estimate the extent of declines.