Urban fragmentation leads to lower floral diversity, with knock-on impacts on bee biodiversity

Abstract Bees and flowering plants are two closely interacting groups of organisms. Habitat loss and fragmentation associated with urbanisation are major threats to both partners. Yet how and why bee and floral richness and diversity co-vary within the urban landscape remain unclear. Here, we sample...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Panagiotis Theodorou, Sarah-Christine Herbst, Belinda Kahnt, Patricia Landaverde-González, Lucie M. Baltz, Julia Osterman, Robert J. Paxton
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Nature Portfolio 2020
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/9ece9f3ed3124158b7efafc9c4f7228f
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Abstract Bees and flowering plants are two closely interacting groups of organisms. Habitat loss and fragmentation associated with urbanisation are major threats to both partners. Yet how and why bee and floral richness and diversity co-vary within the urban landscape remain unclear. Here, we sampled bees and flowering plants in urban green spaces to investigate how bee and flowering plant species richness, their phylogenetic diversity and pollination-relevant functional trait diversity influence each other in response to urban fragmentation. As expected, bee abundance and richness were positively related to flowering plant richness, with bee body size (but not bee richness and diversity) increasing with nectar-holder depth of flowering plants. Causal modelling indicated that bottom-up effects dictated patterns of bee-flower relationships, with urban fragmentation diminishing flowering plants richness and thereby indirectly reducing bee species richness and abundance. The close relationship between bees and flowering plants highlights the risks of their parallel declines in response to land-use change within the urban landscape.