Land-use change reduces bee diversity at local scales, but the impacts of agriculture and urbanisation differ at regional scales. Agriculture has more negative effects overall. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.70006 🧪 🌏 🌐
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It looks like from figure 1 that only in the case of phylogenetic beta diversity did agricultural land have no detectable negative effect on a measure of bee diversity or have I misunderstood?
That's right for this particular analysis but the real story is the way urban areas partially compensate for loss of local diversity by having higher levels of turnover. The paper is open access if you want to read more.
The result comes from over 3000 bee assemblages collected in 157 studies, compiled and analysed by Toby Tsang (not on Bluesky). He deserves all the credit for his enormous patience and dedication in getting this published (finally!).
I'm a very minor middle author on the paper. Our contribution came from the work of our late and greatly-missed friend Olivia Norfolk who collected the data in Egypt. You can read the original paper here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ddi.12295
Comments
It looks like from figure 1 that only in the case of phylogenetic beta diversity did agricultural land have no detectable negative effect on a measure of bee diversity or have I misunderstood?