Detecting Insect Pollinator Declines on Regional and Global Scales

Abstract

Recently there has been considerable concern about declines in bee communities in agricultural and natural habitats. The value of pollination to agriculture, provided primarily by bees, is >$200 billion/year worldwide, and in natural ecosystems it is thought to be even greater. However, no monitoring program exists to accurately detect declines in abundance of insect pollinators; thus, it is difficult to quantify the status of bee communities or estimate the extent of declines. We used data from 11 multiyear studies of bee communities to devise a program to monitor pollinators at regional, national, or international scales. In these studies, 7 different methods for sampling bees were used and bees were sampled on 3 different continents. We estimated that a monitoring program with 200-250 sampling locations each sampled twice over 5 years would provide sufficient power to detect small (2-5%) annual declines in the number of species and in total abundance and would cost U.S.$2,000,000. To detect declines as small as 1% annually over the same period would require >300 sampling locations. Given the role of pollinators in food security and ecosystem function, we recommend establishment of integrated regional and international monitoring programs to detect changes in pollinator communities.

Modeling the status, trends, and impacts of wild bee abundance in the United States

“…A national program to detect future changes in bee populations has been estimated to cost $2,000,000 (55) and to require 5-10 y. Our national assessment can be used to focus such a costly effort, targeting bee and habitat surveys on regions that show high uncertainty, especially where agricultural demand for pollination services is high.…”

Pollinator Diversity: Distribution, Ecological Function, and Conservation

“…The loss of pollinator diversity and abundance has been discussed in a number of influential primary studies and reviews, for example Biesmeijer et al (2006), , Lebuhn et al ()2013. However disagreements have emerged as to how accurate these assessments are, and whether the decline of pollinators (and particularly bees) has been overplayed in the literature and by the media (Ghazoul 2005).…”

Plasticity in the gut microbial community and uptake of Enterobacteriaceae (Gammaproteobacteria) in Bombus terrestris bumblebees’ nests when reared indoors and moved to an outdoor environment

“…Some insects harbor gut communities of specific bacteria, which is especially true in social insects . Within the clade of social bees, research on microbial communities has been focusing on honeybees (Martinson et al 2012;Moran et al 2012) and bumblebees (Koch and Schmid-Hempel 2011b;Meeus et al 2013;Li et al 2015;Praet et al 2015) because of their important pollinating role in natural ecosystems and of many agricultural crops, together with a growing evidence of their dramatic declines worldwide (Ghazoul 2005;Lebuhn et al 2013).…”