Brazilian stingless bees are threatened by habitat conversion and climate change

The stingless bees of the genus Melipona play an important role as pollinators of wild and cultivated plants in the Neotropics, contributing to forest maintenance and food production. Similar to other bees, meliponids are threatened by anthropogenic impacts on the environment, such as habitat conver...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Regional environmental change 2021-03, Vol.21 (1), Article 14
Main Authors: Lima, Valdeir Pereira, Marchioro, Cesar Augusto
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural land
Analysis
Anthropogenic factors
Bees
Climate Change
Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts
Climate models
Conservation
Conversion
Cultivated plants
Earth and Environmental Science
Ecological niches
Environment
Environmental impact
Food production
Geography
Global temperature changes
Habitats
Human influences
Land use
Natural vegetation
Nature Conservation
Niche (Ecology)
Niches
Oceanography
Original Article
Plant reproduction
Pollination
Pollinators
Protected areas
Regional/Spatial Science
Species
Wildlife conservation
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Summary:The stingless bees of the genus Melipona play an important role as pollinators of wild and cultivated plants in the Neotropics, contributing to forest maintenance and food production. Similar to other bees, meliponids are threatened by anthropogenic impacts on the environment, such as habitat conversion and climate change. Here, we apply ecological niche models to estimate the habitat suitability for ten stingless bee species from Brazil. We quantify the impacts of land use change and climate change on their distribution. Additionally, we assess the efficiency of the Brazilian protected areas (PAs) for the conservation of these species. We found that the predicted species range increased in agricultural lands and decreased in natural vegetation between 2000 and 2014. Our models predict that seven species will face a reduction and three species an increase in their suitable habitat in the coming years. The Brazilian PAs fail in safeguarding the majority of climatically suitable habitats for the stingless bee species studied. Our findings suggest that land use and climate change pose a serious risk for the conservation of stingless bees and their pollination services in Brazil.
ISSN:1436-3798
1436-378X
DOI:10.1007/s10113-021-01751-9