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Bee biodiversity usually flies under the radar. There are 20,000 bee species out there, spread across a wide range of habitats and climates. The researchers have now compiled the most detailed global map of bees that could be invaluable for conservation efforts.
Bees are in trouble. From the pesticides we use to the natural habitats we destroy, we are driving devastating change for bees.
The decline has no single cause, but changes in land use for agriculture or urbanization are constantly linked to the decline of bees. During the winter alone, the American bee population decreased by 40%, and the developed world figures show a similar trend.
Most studies focus on honey bees as they are closest to our economic activity. We use them not only for honey, but also to pollinate key agricultural species. Pollinators (mainly bees) provide more than $ 24 billion annual services to the US economy alone, but wild pollinators also make valuable contributions. Even when it’s not the agricultural plants or plants we see near our cities, bees play a key role in virtually every ecosystem they are found in. That’s why mapping them is so important.
“People think of bees only as honey bees, bumblebees and maybe a few others, but there are more species of bees than birds and mammals combined,” says senior author John Ascher, assistant professor of biological sciences at the National University. of Singapore. “The United States has by far the most bee species, but there are also large areas of the African continent and the Middle East that have high levels of unknown diversity, more so than in tropical areas.”
This is the first time that the global richness of bee species has been represented. Ascher and colleagues sifted through a list of nearly 6 million public documents mentioning individual bee species around the world. The global analysis revealed species richness hotspots, but the distribution was not quite what the researchers expected.
Most species follow a latitude distribution in which diversity increases towards the tropics and decreases towards the poles. But bees follow a different distribution: more species are concentrated away from the poles and less close to the equator, a pattern known as a bimodal latitudinal gradient. There also appear to be far fewer bee species in forests and jungles than in arid desert environments, as trees tend to provide fewer food sources for bees than low-lying plants and flowers.
The main goal of the map is to establish a basic level of bee populations. We can’t really know when global populations are dwindling if we don’t know how abundant they are in the first place, and mapping out geographic trends could inform conservation policy. The data can also be combined with other information to reveal patterns of what bees like and what they don’t.
While difficult, these complexities need to be taken into account to understand and map the history of bee evolution.
“Understanding insect distribution is key to evolutionary studies of origin and diversification, as well as ecological or conservation-oriented studies of how specific groups will respond to threats such as climate change or other human-induced phenomena,” observe the researchers in the study. “In light of this, building and sharing our knowledge of insect distribution is one of the biggest and most important challenges biologists and conservationists face, but the challenges of studying insects require the study of specific representative areas or groups.”
But while this is the most comprehensive map of bee diversity ever put together, many questions still remain. Data is scarce in many locations, and more local information can greatly improve the resolution and depth of our knowledge, the researchers note in the study.
This is of particular concern since, in many parts of the developing world, where data tends to be scarcer, local agriculture relies on native bee species, of which much less is known. So the data is missing exactly where we would need it most.
“I was surprised at how terrible most of the previous global data on bee diversity was,” says Alice Hughes, associate professor of conservation biology at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and another author of the article. “A lot of the data was simply too fragmented or too focused on a small number of countries that prioritized data sharing to be able to use these resources for any large-scale analysis.”
The team sees this research as a stepping stone towards a better understanding of global bee diversity,
The authors view this research as an important first step towards a more comprehensive understanding of global bee diversity and an important reference basis for future and more detailed bee research.
The study was published in Current biology.
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