SCALE‐DEPENDENT EFFECTS OF LANDSCAPE CONTEXT ON THREE POLLINATOR GUILDS

By I. Steffan‐Dewenter, Ute Münzenberg, C. Bürger, Carsten Thies, T. Tscharntke. 2002

1,243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most ecological processes and interactions depend on scales much larger than a single habitat, and therefore it is important to link spatial patterns and ecological processes at a landscape scale. Here, we analyzed the effects of landscape context on the distribution of bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) at multiple spatial scales with respect to the following hypotheses: (1) Local abundance and diversity of bees increase with increasing proportion of the surrounding seminatural habitats. (2) Solitary wild bees, bumble bees, and honey bees respond to landscape context at different spatial scales. We selected 15 landscape sectors and determined the percentage of seminatural habitats and the diversity of habitat types at eight spatial scales (radius 250-3000 m) by field inspections and analyses of vegetation maps using two Geographic Information Systems. The percentage of semi- natural habitats varied between 1.4% and 28%. In the center of each landscape sector a patch of potted flowering plants (four perennial and two annual species) was placed in the same habitat type, a grassy field margin adjacent to cereal fields. In all, 865 wild bee individuals and 467 honey bees were observed and an additional 475 individuals were caught for species identification. Species richness and abundance of solitary wild bees showed a close positive correlation with the percentage of seminatural habitats at small scales up to 750 m, whereas bumble bees and honey bees did not respond to landscape context at these scales. In contrast, honey bees were correlated with landscape context at large scales. The densities of flower-visiting honey bees even increased with decreasing proportion of seminatural habitats at a radius of 3000 m. We are not aware of any empirical studies showing contrasting foraging patterns related to landscape context at different spatial scales. We conclude (1) that local landscape destruction affects solitary wild bees more than social bees, possibly changing mutualistic plant-pollinator and competitive wild bees- honey bees interactions and (2) that only analyses of multiple spatial scales may detect the importance of the landscape context for local pollinator communities.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e6e2e704d6c377124d2bb236e11700f81ef9fda

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Citations in the corpus

Plant reproductive susceptibility to habitat fragmentation: review and synthesis through a meta-analysis. (2006, background): “…vulnerable to the effects of habitat fragmentation that can modify richness, composition, abundance and/or behaviour of pollinators or the availability of conspecific mates (e.g. Jennersten 1988; Aizen & Feinsinger 1994a, 2003; Didham et al. 1996; Kearns et al. 1998; Steffan-Dewenter et al. 2002).”
The Swiss agri-environment scheme enhances pollinator diversity and plant reproductive success in nearby intensively managed farmland (2007, background): “In the German agricultural landscape, solitary bees responded most strongly to the proportion of seminatural habitats at the smallest, most local, spatial scale (radius 250 m), whereas social bees showed the strongest correlations at larger spatial scales ( Steffan-Dewenter et al. 2002 ).”
Environmental factors affecting bee diversity in urban and remote grassland plots in Boulder, Colorado (2009, background): “Because bees are central foragers, bee diversity in urban areas may depend on the proximity of nesting sites and floral resources within their limited flight ranges (150–750 m for most solitary bees; Gathmann and Tscharntke 2002; Steffan-Dewenter et al. 2002; Cane 2005b).”
Multi-scale effects of landscape complexity and crop management on pollen beetle parasitism rate (2011, background): “Since structurally complex landscapes are recognized as supporting more abundant and diverse floral resources than simple landscapes (Steffan-Dewenter et al. 2002; Kleijn and van Langevelde 2006), woodland and grassland habitats”
Landscape effects of forest loss in a pollination system (2007, background): “These scales of radii were selected as being relevant to foraging distance of and landscape-scale response of bee communities (Gathmann and Tscharntke 2002; Steffan-Dewenter et al. 2002; Winfree et al. 2007).”
Local habitat characteristics but not landscape urbanization drive pollinator visitation and native plant pollination in forest remnants (2013, methodology): “R2 values peaked at 1000 m; thus 1000 m was used as the spatial scale in subsequent landscape-scale analyses (see Steffan-Dewenter et al., 2002).”