Abstract
Native bees contribute a considerable portion of pollination services for endemic as well as introduced plant species. Their decline has been attributed to several human-derived influences including global warming as well as the reduction, alteration, and loss of bees’ habitat. With human expansion comes along the introduction of exotic plant species with negative impacts over native ecosystems. Anthropic effects may even have a deeper impact on communities adapted to extreme environments, such as high elevation habitats, where abiotic stressors alone are a natural limitation to biodiversity. Among these effects, the introduction of exotic plants and urbanization may have a greater influence on native communities. In this work, we explored such problems, studying the relationship between the landscape and its effect over richness and abundance of native bees from the subandean belt in the Andes mountain chain. Furthermore, we investigated the effects of exotic plant abundance on this high-altitude bee assemblage. Despite the landscape not showing an effect over bee richness and abundance, exotic plants did have a significant influence over the native bee assemblage. The abundance of exotic plants was associated with a relative increase in the proportion of small and medium bee species. Moreover, Halictidae was the only family that appeared to be favored by an increase in the abundance of exotic plant species. We discuss these results and the urgent need for further research of high-altitude environments due to their vulnerability and high endemicity.
Highlights
Native bee species are important as native plant pollinators, and 15–30% of productive crops require their pollination services (McGregor, 1976)
Despite above-mentioned problems, we found no published studies that focus on the response of native bee assemblages towards the effects of the landscape’s changes and the introduction of exotic flora in high elevation ecosystems
We evaluated if urbanization could have an effect on native bee species richness and abundance
Summary
Native bee species are important as native plant pollinators, and 15–30% of productive crops require their pollination services (McGregor, 1976). Climate change has been listed among the explanations for native bee declines (Potts et al, 2010). Among the consequences of pollinator declines are changes in the structure of biotic communities, degradation of biodiversity, and reduction of food production from negative effects on native flowers and crops of economic importance that depend on pollinators to achieve reproduction (Allen-Wardell et al, 1998; Potts et al, 2010). Pollinator declines may not be easy to recover from if they continue progressing from the continuous anthropogenic pressure on pollinators (Allen-Wardell et al, 1998; Winfree et al, 2009)
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