Publication Date:
2006-07-22
Description:
Despite widespread concern about declines in pollination services, little is known about the patterns of change in most pollinator assemblages. By studying bee and hoverfly assemblages in Britain and the Netherlands, we found evidence of declines (pre-versus post-1980) in local bee diversity in both countries; however, divergent trends were observed in hoverflies. Depending on the assemblage and location, pollinator declines were most frequent in habitat and flower specialists, in univoltine species, and/or in nonmigrants. In conjunction with this evidence, outcrossing plant species that are reliant on the declining pollinators have themselves declined relative to other plant species. Taken together, these findings strongly suggest a causal connection between local extinctions of functionally linked plant and pollinator species.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Biesmeijer, J C -- Roberts, S P M -- Reemer, M -- Ohlemuller, R -- Edwards, M -- Peeters, T -- Schaffers, A P -- Potts, S G -- Kleukers, R -- Thomas, C D -- Settele, J -- Kunin, W E -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2006 Jul 21;313(5785):351-4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology and Earth and Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. j.c.biesmeijer@leeds.ac.uk〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16857940" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animal Migration
;
Animals
;
*Bees
;
*Biodiversity
;
*Diptera
;
*Ecosystem
;
Environment
;
Flowers
;
Great Britain
;
Netherlands
;
*Plants
;
*Pollen
;
Population Dynamics
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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