A meta-analysis of bees' responses to anthropogenic disturbance.
By R. Winfree, R. Aguilar, D. P. Vázquez, Gretchen LeBuhn, M. Aizen. Ecology, 2009
1,010 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Pollinators may be declining globally, a matter of concern because animal pollination is required by most of the world's plant species, including many crop plants. Human land use and the loss of native habitats is thought to be an important driver of decline for wild, native pollinators, yet the findings of published studies on this topic have never been quantitatively synthesized. Here we use meta-analysis to synthesize the literature on how bees, the most important group of pollinators, are affected by human disturbances such as habitat loss, grazing, logging, and agriculture. We obtained 130 effect sizes from 54 published studies recording bee abundance and/or species richness as a function of human disturbance. Both bee abundance and species richness were significantly, negatively affected by disturbance. However, the magnitude of the effects was not large. Furthermore, the only disturbance type showing a significant negative effect, habitat loss and fragmentation, was statistically significant only in systems where very little natural habitat remains. Therefore, it would be premature to draw conclusions about habitat loss having caused global pollinator decline without first assessing the extent to which the existing studies represent the status of global ecosystems. Future pollinator declines seem likely given forecasts of increasing land-use change.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd6747a873af8bca5c9ede154f87ab13ee97f281
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Insect Science
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Native Pollinators in Anthropogenic Habitats (2011, methodology): “Modified from Winfree et al. (2009).”
- Grazing alters insect visitation networks and plant mating systems (2014, neutral): “Such plant community changes can subsequently affect abundance and diversity at higher trophic levels (Vulliamy, Potts & Willmer 2006; Winfree et al. 2009; Woodcock et al. 2009) and alter *Correspondence author.”
- Country-specific effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on honey bees and wild bees (2017, background): “Main Text: Global declines in honeybees and wild bees have been linked to pathogens, climate change, habitat fragmentation and pesticide use (1-3).”
- How well do we understand landscape effects on pollinators and pollination services (2012, background): “Most studies point to landscape changes resulting from intensive land use and leading to habitat loss and fragmentation as one of the primary threats to pollination services (Kremen et al. 2002; Steffan-Dewenter & Westphal 2008; Winfree et al. 2009).”
- The same, but different: pollen foraging in honeybee and bumblebee colonies (2011, background): “Among these, changes/reductions in habitat and resource availability and diversity are considered one (albeit not the only) cause of the observed bee decline (Williams 1986; Steffan-Dewenter and Tscharntke 1999; Aizen and Feinsinger 2003; Goulson and Darvill 2004; Hines and Hendrix 2005; Goulson et ”
- How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals (2011, background): “…of the functional importance of biotic pollination, recent evidence for declines in native pollinator abundance and diversity has generated widespread concern (Biesmeijer et al. 2006, Kosior et al. 2007, Colla and Packer 2008, Grixti et al. 2009, Winfree et al. 2009, though see Ghazoul 2005).”
- Diversity and abundance of solitary and primitively eusocial bees in an urban centre: a case study from Northampton (England) (2015, background): “Among the most important ones are land use changes and fragmentation (Goulson et al. 2008; Winfree et al. 2009), environmental pollution and pesticides (Kevan et al.”
- Contrasting patterns in species and functional-trait diversity of bees in an agricultural landscape (2015, background): “However, despite the potential for agricultural land use to harm wild pollinator populations, bee responses to agriculture are not uniformly negative (Tscharntke et al. 2005; Winfree et al. 2009; Williams et al. 2010).”
- The winners and losers of land use intensification: pollinator community disassembly is non‐random and alters functional diversity (2014, neutral): “…example, body size correlates with pollination efficiency (Larsen et al., 2005), foraging duration (Stone & Willmer, 1989; Stone, 1994), foraging distance in some bees (Greenleaf et al., 2007) and susceptibility to land use change (Larsen et al., 2005; Winfree et al., 2009; Williams et al., 2010).”
- Frontiers inEcology and the Environment From research to action : enhancing crop yield through wild pollinators (2014, background): “In addition to functional traits, interspecific differences in response traits to climate and land-use change (Winfree et al. 2009; Williams et al. 2010) can increase resilience of pollination services (Brittain et al. 2013).”
- Impact of landscape alteration and invasions on pollinators: a meta‐analysis (2012, background): “…the pollination and reproduction of plants differs depending on plant reproductive traits (Aguilar et al. 2006); the effect of alien plants on pollination and seed set of neighbouring native plants (Morales & Traveset 2009); and the influence of landscape disturbances on bees (Winfree et al. 2009).”