Abstract
Insects are key ecosystem service providers, and loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to have cascading effects on natural ecosystems and human welfare. Particularly alarming is the decline in wild pollinators, which is already limiting crop production. Bees are the most important group of animal pollinators, they represent a broad range of ecological traits and are in urgent need of conservation. They are also ideal ecological model species for studying the influence of functional traits on population connectivity at different spatial scales, as their community composition vary drastically along environmental gradients and their broad variation of functional ecological traits and life history strategies is well studied. Because bees don’t tend to migrate long distances, their traits and genomic signatures may be expected to vary with habitat conditions, making habitat preference and functional traits possible predictors for population structure and connectivity. In this project, we will combine functional ecology and habitat suitability data with genome-wide biodiversity estimates, to obtain insights into wild bee population connectivity on multiple geographical scales. By using species with varying functional traits and dispersal abilities, our models of connectivity may be fitted to a limited number of focal species or generalised to entire pollinator communities. Such novel population connectivity models, locating diversity hotspots and dispersal barriers, will provide essential basis for conservation efforts to mitigate the effects of human activities on insect decline.