Abstract
Bumblebees in Europe have been in steady decline since the 1900s. This decline is expected to continue with climate change as the main driver. However, at the local scale, land use and land cover (LULC) change strongly affects the occurrence of bumblebees. At present, LULC change is rarely included in models of future distributions of species. This study's objective is to compare the roles of dynamic LULC change and climate change on the projected distribution patterns of 48 European bumblebee species for three change scenarios until 2100 at the scales of Europe, and Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg (BENELUX). We compared three types of models: (1) only climate covariates, (2) climate and static LULC covariates and (3) climate and dynamic LULC covariates. The climate and LULC change scenarios used in the models include, extreme growth applied strategy (GRAS), business as might be usual and sustainable European development goals. We analysed model performance, range gain/loss and the shift in range limits for all bumblebees. Overall, model performance improved with the introduction of LULC covariates. Dynamic models projected less range loss and gain than climate-only projections, and greater range loss and gain than static models. Overall, there is considerable variation in species responses and effects were most pronounced at the BENELUX scale. The majority of species were predicted to lose considerable range, particularly under the extreme growth scenario (GRAS; overall mean: 64%±34). Model simulations project a number of local extinctions and considerable range loss at the BENELUX scale (overall mean: 56%±39). Therefore, we recommend species-specific modelling to understand how LULC and climate interact in future modelling. The efficacy of dynamic LULC change should improve with higher thematic and spatial resolution. Nevertheless, current broad scale representations of change in major land use classes impact modelled future distribution patterns.
Highlights
We evaluate the effects of land use and land cover (LULC) change scenarios available for Europe, on the distributional changes projected by species distribution models (SDMs) for 48 European bumblebee species projected onto Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (BENELUX), and at the European scale
This study shows that incorporating dynamic LULC change scenarios, even those with low precision and few classes, can have significant effects on the projected distributions of bumblebee species
It is surprising that the use of climate change projections is commonplace, whereas LULC change projections are rarely used in species forecasting (Titeux et al, 2016)
Summary
Our study group is the genus Bombus, for which we have detailed, long-term, biogeographical records for most of Europe, and which has shown significant decline in the last one hundred years (Biesmeijer et al, 2006; Carvalheiro et al, 2013; Kerr et al, 2015; Rasmont et al, 2005). In addition to presenting results for bumblebees as a group, we chose two species, Bombus argillaceus (Scopoli, 1763; increasing in range) and B. veteranus (Fabricius, 1793; decreasing in range), to look more closely at the difference between model projections with and without LULC covariates. We chose these two species as they are at opposite end of the spectrum of climate risk, both had high model performance values, both have a large number of collection records within Europe and we believe them to be representative of two futures, i.e. considerable range gain and considerable range loss, respectively (Rasmont et al, 2015). Under future climate-only projections B. veteranus is expected to decrease in range considerably (Rasmont et al, 2015)
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