Insects have had to deal with increasingly fragmented landscapes that have been devastated by the agricultural expansions of the 20th century. Such landscape fragmentation –combined with the impacts of climate change– affects many insect species simultaneously. Nevertheless, the time, expertise and resources to monitor a highly diverse number of threatened species simply does not exist. There is therefore an urgent need for conservation frameworks that allows ecological insights in connectivity to be generalized in scale from a limited number of species to entire communities. With this proposal, we provide such a framework. We focus on wild bees as these are species characterized by specific traits that make them ideal ecological model species for studying the influence of functional traits on population connectivity at different spatial scales.
In this project, we collaborate with Markus Sydenham from NINA and Anders Nielsen from NIBIO.
By incorporating contemporary habitat suitability, this work generates spatial, explicit ecological predictions for the improved conservation management of wild pollinator diversity. Such predictions will help mitigate the impacts of climate change, habitat fragmentation and habitat destruction. We therefore work towards the realisation of a number of UN Sustainable Development Goals and targets (SDG13; 13.1, 13.2 & 13.3 / SGD15; 15.1, 15.2, 15.4 & 15.5).
