Along urbanization sprawl, exotic plants distort native bee (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) assemblages in high elevation Andes ecosystem
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Entomology
- Keywords
- exotic plant species, Apoidea, montane ecosystems, pollinators, native bee assemblage, urbanization
- Copyright
- © 2018 Henríquez-Piskulich et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Along urbanization sprawl, exotic plants distort native bee (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) assemblages in high elevation Andes ecosystem. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27140v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27140v1
Abstract
Native bees contribute with a considerable portion of pollination services for endemic as well as economically important plant species. Their decline has been attributed to several human-derived influences including global warming as well as the reduction, alteration and loss of bees’ habitat. Moreover, together with human expansion comes along the introduction of exotic plant species with negative impacts over native ecosystems. Anthropic effects may have even a deeper impact on communities adapted to extreme environments, such as high elevation habitats, where abiotic stressors alone are a natural limitation to biodiversity. In these, human-borne alterations, such as the introduction of exotic plants and urbanization, may have a greater influence on native communities. In this work we explored such problem, studying the relationship between landscape and its effect over richness and abundance of native bees from the subandean belt in the Andes mountain chain. Furthermore, we investigated the effects of exotic plant abundance on this high-altitude bee assemblage. Despite landscape did not show an effect over bee richness and abundance, exotic plants did have a significant influence over native bee assemblage. The abundance of exotic plants was associated with a relative increase in the proportion of small and medium bee species. Moreover, Halictidae was the only family that appeared to be favored by an increase in the abundance of exotic plant species. We discuss these results and the urgent need for further research of high-altitude environments due to their vulnerability and high endemicity.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.