School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America.
USDA-ARS Pollinating Insects Research Unit (PIRU), Utah State University, Logan, Utah, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Jan 17;14(1):e0207566. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207566. eCollection 2019.
Thousands of species of bees are in global decline, yet research addressing the ecology and status of these wild pollinators lags far behind work being done to address similar impacts on the managed honey bee. This knowledge gap is especially glaring in natural areas, despite knowledge that protected habitats harbor and export diverse bee communities into nearby croplands where their pollination services have been valued at over $3 billion per year. Surrounded by ranches and farmlands, Pinnacles National Park in the Inner South Coast Range of California contains intact Mediterranean chaparral shrubland. This habitat type is among the most valuable for bee biodiversity worldwide, as well as one of the most vulnerable to agricultural conversion, urbanization and climate change. Pinnacles National Park is also one of a very few locations where extensive native bee inventory efforts have been repeated over time. This park thus presents a valuable and rare opportunity to monitor long-term trends and baseline variability of native bees in natural habitats. Fifteen years after a species inventory marked Pinnacles as a biodiversity hotspot for native bees, we resurveyed these native bee communities over two flowering seasons using a systematic, plot-based design. Combining results, we report a total of 450 bee species within this 109km2 natural area of California, including 48 new species records as of 2012 and 95 species not seen since 1999. As far as we are aware, this species richness marks Pinnacles National Park as one of the most densely diverse places known for native bees. We explore patterns of bee diversity across this protected landscape, compare results to other surveyed natural areas, and highlight the need for additional repeated inventories in protected areas over time amid widespread concerns of bee declines.
全球范围内有数千种蜜蜂物种数量正在减少，但针对这些野生传粉媒介的生态学和现状的研究远远落后于针对管理蜜蜂所做的类似影响的研究。在自然保护区中，这种知识差距尤为明显，尽管人们知道，受保护的栖息地拥有并向附近的农田输出多样化的蜜蜂群落，这些蜜蜂的传粉服务每年价值超过 30 亿美元。加利福尼亚州内陆南海岸山脉的皮纳特斯国家公园（Pinnacles National Park）四周环绕着牧场和农田，拥有完整的地中海月桂灌丛栖息地。这种生境类型是全球蜜蜂生物多样性最有价值的类型之一，也是最容易受到农业转化、城市化和气候变化影响的类型之一。皮纳特斯国家公园也是为数不多的几个随着时间的推移，对广泛的本地蜜蜂清单进行了多次重复的地点之一。因此，该公园为监测自然栖息地中本地蜜蜂的长期趋势和基线变化提供了宝贵而难得的机会。在对物种清单进行了 15 年的调查后，皮纳特斯国家公园被标记为本地蜜蜂的生物多样性热点，我们在两个开花季节使用系统的、基于斑块的设计对这些本地蜜蜂群落进行了重新调查。综合结果，我们在加利福尼亚州这个 109 平方公里的自然区域内共报告了 450 种蜜蜂，其中包括截至 2012 年的 48 种新物种记录和自 1999 年以来未见过的 95 种。据我们所知，这种物种丰富度使皮纳特斯国家公园成为已知的以本地蜜蜂为特色的最密集多样的地方之一。我们探讨了这种受保护景观中蜜蜂多样性的模式，将结果与其他调查的自然区域进行了比较，并强调了随着对蜜蜂数量下降的广泛关注，需要在受保护区域内随着时间的推移进行额外的重复清查。
