Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1007/s10980-016-0471-x
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Title (Primary) Landscape heterogeneity enhances stability of wild bee abundance under highly varying temperature, but not under highly varying precipitation
Author Papanikolaou, A.D.; Kühn, I. ORCID logo ; Frenzel, M. ORCID logo ; Schweiger, O.
Source Titel Landscape Ecology
Year 2017
Department BZF; iDiv
Volume 32
Issue 3
Page From 581
Page To 593
Language englisch
Supplements https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs10980-016-0471-x/MediaObjects/10980_2016_471_MOESM1_ESM.docx
Keywords Climate change; Ecosystem service; Landscape heterogeneity; Landscape management; Mitigation; Spatiotemporal stability; Weather variability; Wild bee abundance
UFZ wide themes RU1;
Abstract

Context

The abundance of important providers of ecosystem services such as wild bees likely increases with landscape heterogeneity, but may also fluctuate across the flowering season following varying weather conditions.

Objectives

In the present study, we investigated the combined effect of landscape heterogeneity and intra-annual variability in temperature and precipitation on the spatial and temporal stability of wild bee abundance.

Methods

We used bee monitoring data from six 4 km × 4 km sites in central Germany and 16 local communities per site. The data were collected six times per year from 2010 to 2013. Following a multimodel inference approach, we identified the importance of landscape heterogeneity, weather variability and their interaction to the stability of wild bee abundance.

Results

We found that the stability of wild bee abundance increased with landscape heterogeneity, but decreased with increasing intra-annual variability in both temperature and precipitation. However, our key finding was a buffering mechanism enabling high abundance stability in heterogeneous landscapes even under highly variable temperature conditions. Interestingly, the same mechanism did not apply for high variability in precipitation.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that increasing landscape heterogeneity is beneficial for protecting wild bees against the projected increase in temperature variability until the end of the twenty first century, although we cannot make inferences for extreme events such as heatwaves. Nevertheless, our results equally highlight that landscape heterogeneity should not be treated as a one-size-fits-all solution and the need remains for developing alternative strategies to mitigate the effect of increasing variability in precipitation.

Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=18273
Papanikolaou, A.D., Kühn, I., Frenzel, M., Schweiger, O. (2017):
Landscape heterogeneity enhances stability of wild bee abundance under highly varying temperature, but not under highly varying precipitation
Landsc. Ecol. 32 (3), 581 - 593 10.1007/s10980-016-0471-x