Canopy vs. understory: Does tree diversity affect bee and wasp communities and their natural enemies across forest strata?

By S. Sobek, T. Tscharntke, C. Scherber, S. Schiele, I. Steffan‐Dewenter. 2009

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bees and wasps provide important ecosystem services such as pollination and biocontrol in crop-dominated landscapes, but surprisingly little information is available on hymenopteran communities in temperate forest ecosystems. Species richness and abundance of bees and wasps can be hypothesised to increase with plant diversity, structural complexity, and availability of food and nesting resources. By experimentally exposing standardised nesting sites, we examined abundance and species richness of cavity-nesting bees (pollinators), wasps (predators) and their associated parasitoids across a tree diversity gradient in a temperate deciduous forest habitat. In addition, spatial distribution of individuals and species across forest strata (canopy vs. understory) was tested. Abundance and species richness was high for predatory wasps, but generally low for pollinators. Species-rich forest stands supported increased abundance, but not species richness, of pollinators and predatory wasps, and also increased abundance and species richness of natural enemies. In addition, the forests showed a distinct spatial stratification in that abundance of bees, wasps and parasitoids as well as parasitism rates were higher in the canopy than understory. We conclude that particularly the canopy in temperate forest stands can serve as an important habitat for predatory wasp species and natural enemies, but not bee pollinators. Enhanced tree diversity was related to increased hymenopteran abundance, which is likely to be linked to an increase in nesting and food resources in mixed forest stands.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fdef376fc1f02c434e476f3ecc03e9bc4a23f05f

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Genetics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Bees in the trees: Diverse spring fauna in temperate forest edge canopies (2021, background): “Other studies have also found limited correlations at the site level (Sobek et al., 2009; Simanonok and Burkle, 2019).”
Is forest diversity driving ecosystem function and service (2010, methodology): “The following literature was used: biota community property: [14,15 ,16–23,27 ,29], resistance to herbivory [25,26,27 ,28,29], invasion resistance [24], production [30,32 ,33,34 ,35,40,43], survival [32 ,34 ,40] recruitment [25,40], litter production [31,44], root biomass [22,45], soil C [46], eleme”
Cavity-nest boxes for solitary bees: a century of design and research (2017, background): “…gradients can be studied to understand the impacts of landscape change on bee communities (e.g. wetlands: Moroń et al. 2008; forest canopy cover: Sobek et al. 2009; heavy metal contamination: Moroń et al. 2012; mass-flowering agricultural crop: Diekötter et al. 2014; urban land use: Fortel et…”