Abstract
Bumblebees (Bombus ssp.) are among the most important wild pollinators, but many species have suffered from range declines. Land-use change, agricultural intensification, and the associated loss of habitat have been identified as drivers of the observed dynamics, amplifying pressures from a changing climate. However, these drivers are still underrepresented in continental-scale species distribution modeling. Here, we project the potential distribution of 47 European bumblebee species in 2050 and 2080 from existing European-scale distribution maps, based on a set of climate and land-use futures simulated through a regional integrated assessment model and consistent with the RCP-SSP scenario framework. We compare projections including (1) dynamic climate and constant land use (CLIM); (2) constant climate and dynamic land use (LU); and (3) dynamic climate and dynamic land use (COMB) to disentangle the effects of land use and climate change on future habitat suitability, providing the first rigorous continental-scale assessment of linked climate-land-use futures for bumblebees. We find that direct climate impacts, although variable across species, dominate responses for most species, especially under high-end climate change scenarios (up to 99% range loss). Land-use impacts are highly variable across species and scenarios, ranging from severe losses (up to 75% loss) to considerable gains (up to 68% gain) of suitable habitat extent. Rare species thereby tend to be disproportionally affected by both climate and land-use change. COMB projections reveal that land use may amplify, attenuate, or offset changes to suitable habitat extent expected from climate impact depending on species and scenario. Especially in low-end climate change scenarios, land use has the potential to become a game changer in determining the direction and magnitude of range changes, indicating substantial potential for targeted conservation management.
Highlights
The global food system greatly benefits from insect pollination that provides an estimated economic value between €9.7 bn (Vallecillo et al, 2019) and ~€14 bn in the European Union (Potts et al, 2015) and ~€153 bn globally (Gallai et al, 2009)
We extrapolate the potential distribution of 47 European bumblebee species to 2050 and 2080, considering various levels of climate and land-use change, consistent with the representative concentration pathway (RCP)-shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) scenario
We find substantial changes to potential bumblebee habitat extent in Europe due to climate change (CLIM modeling experiment; land- use constant) that gradually increase with the severity of climate change
Summary
The global food system greatly benefits from insect pollination that provides an estimated economic value between €9.7 bn (Vallecillo et al, 2019) and ~€14 bn in the European Union (Potts et al, 2015) and ~€153 bn globally (Gallai et al, 2009). Continental-scale studies often do not account for the effects of land-use change (e.g., agricultural intensification, urbanization, or expansion of cropland and grazing land) on bumblebee habitat When included, it is only through ad hoc scenarios and with little thematic detail (Marshall et al, 2018; Soroye et al, 2020). The land-use changes they considered were limited, and had relatively low importance compared to climate change impacts; a finding they attributed partly to the difficulty of capturing land-use and land-management changes at a level of detail relevant for bumblebee ecology (Marshall, Beckers, et al, 2020) Due to such methodological limitations, there have been no attempts yet to quantify potential future changes of bumblebee habitat area in a framework where different levels of climate change and various plausible land-use futures are combined to a coherent set of linked climate–land-use scenarios. The details of the individual steps in the analysis are described
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