Abstract
Native wild bees in Alberta play an important role of providing pollination ecosystem services throughout the province. However, wild bees are in decline globally due to habitat loss, pesticides, pathogens and climate change. The status of native bees in Alberta is largely unknown due to a lack of data. There is also limited knowledge regarding the distribution of Alberta's native bees and their habitats.
This study aims to understand how land cover type and climate drive wild bee communities within Alberta. While also determining if local or landscape level land cover affect communities differently.
In 2018 Bee specimens were collected from 76 traps located across Alberta and the species were identified to understand what makes up Alberta's native bee community. Percent land cover surrounding each trap at four buffer sizes was determined using arcGIS and data from Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute. While climate data was obtained at each location using climateNA.
A variance and hierarchal partitioning as well as db-RDA were performed which concluded that land cover at each individual spatial has little unique impact on the overall community, rather, climate variables have more influence on the community. Suggesting that the scale at which conservation efforts are done for bees in potentially irrelevant. When looking at each scale individually, broadleaf forests are consistently the most influential to bee community. After clustering the sites into similar climatic groups, the relevant landcover types shift slightly revealing that agriculture plays an important role for bees in hot and dry climates. Overall, this study highlights that the broad climate gradient in Alberta makes it difficult to create a universal conservation plan for bees in the province and instead need to be assessed per eco region.