Assessing bee species richness in two Mediterranean communities: importance of habitat type and sampling techniques
By Anders Nielsen, I. Steffan‐Dewenter, C. Westphal, O. Messinger, S. Potts, Stuart P. M. Roberts, Josef Settele, Hajnalka Szentgyörgyi, B. Vaissière, Michalis Vaitis and 8 more. Ecological research, 2011
196 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The decline of bees has raised concerns regarding their conservation and the maintenance of ecosystem services they provide to bee-pollinated wild flowers and crops. Although the Mediterranean region is a hotspot for bee species richness, their status remains poorly studied. There is an urgent need for cost-effective, reliable, and unbiased sampling methods that give good bee species richness estimates. This study aims: (a) to assess bee species richness in two common Mediterranean habitat types: semi-natural scrub (phrygana) and managed olive groves; (b) to compare species richness in those systems to that of other biogeographic regions, and (c) to assess whether six different sampling methods (pan traps, variable and standardized transect walks, observation plots and trap nests), previously tested in other European biogeographic regions, are suitable in Mediterranean communities. Eight study sites, four per habitat type, were selected on the island of Lesvos, Greece. The species richness observed was high compared to other habitat types worldwide for which comparable data exist. Pan traps collected the highest proportion of the total bee species richness across all methods at the scale of a study site. Variable and standardized transect walks detected the highest total richness over all eight study sites. Trap nests and observation plots detected only a limited fraction of the bee species richness. To assess the total bee species richness in bee diversity hotspots, such as the studied habitats, we suggest a combination of transect walks conducted by trained bee collectors and pan trap sampling.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0479af03241a5d0c8df86971fa3087a6e1c65837
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Variable flowering phenology and pollinator use in a community suggest future phenological mismatch (2014, background): “…diversity is highest in warm and dry situations (O’Toole and Raw, 1991; Petanidou and Ellis, 1993, 1996; Michener, 2000; Petanidou and Lamborn, 2005; Nielsen et al., 2011) and whose activity has been shown elsewhere to be negatively correlated with precipitation (e.g. Devoto et al., 2009; Gonz…”
- Effects of grazing intensity on pollinator abundance and diversity, and on pollination services (2016, methodology): “…Spach, Centaurea spinosa L., and A. ramosus, are especially rich in bees (Hymenoptera: Andrenidae, Apidae, Colletidae, Halictidae, Megachilidae, and Melittidae), bee flies (Diptera: Bombilidae), and hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae) (Petanidou & Ellis, 1993; Potts et al., 2006; Nielsen et al., 2011).”
- Quantifying the impacts of bioenergy crops on pollinating insect abundance and diversity: a field‐scale evaluation reveals taxon‐specific responses (2013, methodology): “To sample all pollinator groups as comprehensively as possible in each crop type, we used a number of recommended methods (Westphal et al. 2008; Nielsen et al. 2011) in both the noncropped field margins around the crop with an adjacent hedgerow and in the centre of the crop fields.”