Abstract
Invasive species such as Bombus terrestris represent a severe threat that can result in the decline of local biodiversity. We examined the habitat suitability for B. terrestris invasion in East Asian countries and the risk of habitat overlap with 24 bumblebee species from different groups in China. All East Asian countries were predicted to be susceptible to invasion by B. terrestris, with the highest habitat suitability occurring in China followed by Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Mongolia. Within China, which is a global biodiversity hotspot for bumblebees, three different regions, north-west, central to south-east and north-east, were predicted as being highly suitable for invasion. In China, the group of species closely related to B. terrestris showed higher sensitivity (89%) to habitat overlap with B. terrestris than did the group of non-closely related species (73%). The risk of overlap for the three major regional bumblebees within China decreased in the order southern region, northern region and Tibetan Plateau region. Due to the sensitivity of habitat suitability and overlap, the use of the introduced European bumblebee B. terrestris for pollination services should be discouraged in regions with overlapping habitats in China, and management strategies should be implemented to conserve the vulnerable bumblebees in all East Asian countries.
Highlights
Local biodiversity faces a serious threat from the introduction of alien invasive species, which can result in extinctions or population declines[1,2,3,4,5]
Variation in model performance from poor to excellent was observed based on the true skilled statistics (TSS) values (0~0.98)
The highest modelling accuracy was found with MaxEnt for almost all 25 species including B. terrestris, and the models with the highest levels of accuracy were Genetic Algorithm for Rule Set Prediction (GARP) and Environmental Distance, Envelope Score and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for 24, 19, 19, 7 and 1 species, respectively, under the receiver operating characteristics curves (ROC) threshold
Summary
Local biodiversity faces a serious threat from the introduction of alien invasive species, which can result in extinctions or population declines[1,2,3,4,5]. In the past 10 years, commercial B. terrestris colonies from Europe have increasingly been introduced into China and some East Asian countries to meet the demands of crop pollination in greenhouses This practice has raised the question of whether there are risks to the habitats of native bumblebees from this introduced species. An analysis of habitat overlap risk is necessary to identify the areas that may have favourable conditions for interspecific competition between B. terrestris and vulnerable local bumblebee species Such an analysis can be performed through spatial distribution modelling (SDM)[32] and GIS (geographical information system) approaches. SDM techniques are considered good predictive tools and have been used previously to model the distribution of invasive or unknown species[33,34] These approaches are among the most important for developing conservation strategies for declining bumblebee species[19,35]. This study attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Are all East Asian countries susceptible to B. terrestris invasion? (2) What regions of China offer potential habitats facilitating B. terrestris development and establishment? (3) Are some groups of local bumblebee species more sensitive than others to habitat overlap with B. terrestris within China?
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