Safeguarding nocturnal pollinators for food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

Nocturnal pollinators are vital for food security in sub-Saharan Africa, yet they face numerous threats, including habitat loss, light pollution, and climate change. Understanding these combined risks and implementing targeted management strategies to protect them is essential for ensuring sustainable agriculture, food security, and biodiversity in the region.

Landscape structure, climate variability, and soil quality shape crop biomass patterns in agricultural ecosystems of Bavaria.

Understanding how environmental variability shapes crop biomass is essential for improving yield stability and guiding climate-resilient agriculture. To address this, we compared biomass estimates from a semi-empirical light use efficiency (LUE) model with predictions from a machine learning-remote sensing framework that integrates environmental variables. We applied a combined LUE and random forest (RF) model to estimate the mean biomass of winter wheat and oilseed rape across Bavaria, Germany, from 2001 to 2019.

Pollinator-Promoting Interventions in European Urban Habitats-A Synthesis.

Pollinators receive considerable interest due to their fundamental role in ecosystem functioning and human well-being. Unlike farmlands, studies of urban pollinator-promoting interventions are scarce and have not been synthesised, hampering policy implementation. To fill this gap, we compared pollinator-promoting interventions (treatment) with conventionally managed (control) sites regarding vegetation, floral resources, and pollinators.

The Significance of Genetic Relatedness and Nest Sharing on the Worker-Worker Similarity of Gut Bacterial Microbiome and Cuticular Hydrocarbon Profile in a Sweat Bee.

The cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) profile and the gut microbiome (GM) are crucial traits which have a significant impact on the life of bees. In honey bees, the CHC profile and the GM interact finely through trophallaxis, such that the characteristics of the GM are partially defined by the chemical recognition among sisters. However, most of the known primitively eusocial bees show simpler social traits, including moderate genetic relatedness among colony members, often due to workers' nest drifting or dispersal, and lack of trophallaxis.

A shortcut to sample coverage standardization in metabarcoding data provides new insights into land-use effects on insect diversity.

Identifying key drivers of insect diversity decline in the Anthropocene remains a major challenge in biodiversity research. Metabarcoding has rapidly gained popularity for species identification, yet the lack of abundance data complicates accurate diversity metrics like sample coverage-standardized species richness. Additionally, the vast number of taxa lacks a unified phylogeny or trait database.

Warmer temperatures reinforce negative land-use impacts on bees, but not on higher insect trophic levels.

Climate and land-use change are major drivers of insect decline, yet their interactive effects on insect richness and abundance, especially across trophic levels, remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate how temperature and land use shape insect communities across spatial scales and trophic levels, from flowering plants and cavity-nesting bees to hunting wasps, their antagonists and parasitism rates. Using trap nests and a space-for-time approach, we surveyed 179 plots spanning four habitat types (forest, grassland, arable land and settlements) across 60 study regions in Germany covering semi-natural, agricultural and urban landscapes.

Polyfloral nutritional resources promote bumble bee colony development after exposure to a pesticide mixture.

Bumble bees are important pollinators of crops in the field and greenhouses. They are naturally exposed to a combination of interacting stressors, e.g.

Net primary productivity but not its remote-sensing proxies predict mammal diversity in Andean-Amazonian rainforests.

Tropical forests are disappearing, but we have a limited understanding of the factors driving species coexistence in mammal communities of old-growth forest ecosystems. The total energy that is bound by plants is assumed to be a key factor determining mammalian species richness, but accurately measuring energy flows in complex ecosystems is difficult, and most studies therefore rely on remote-sensing-based surrogates of net primary productivity (NPP). We monitored mammal species richness across three seasons using camera traps on 26 study plots along a forested, elevational gradient from 245 to 3588 m above sea level in southeastern Peru for which a unique dataset on field-measured NPP exists.

Landscape management can foster pollinator richness in fragmented high-value habitats.

Pollinator diversity is declining due to habitat loss, low habitat quality, limited habitat connectivity and intensification of agriculture in remaining high-value habitats within human-dominated landscapes, such as calcareous grasslands. Options to increase the local area of protected habitats are often limited. Therefore, we asked how local habitat quality as well as agri-environmental schemes (AES) and configuration of the surrounding landscape can contribute to the preservation of pollinator diversity.

Cold waves in the Amazon rainforest and their ecological impact.

Cold waves crossing the Amazon rainforest are an extraordinary phenomenon likely to be affected by climate change. We here describe an extensive cold wave that occurred in June 2023 in Amazonian-Andean forests and compare environmental temperatures to experimentally measured thermal tolerances and their impact on lowland animal communities (insects and wild mammals). While we found strong reductions in activity abundance of all animal groups under the cold wave, tropical lowland animals showed thermal tolerance limits below the lowest environmental temperatures measured during the cold wave.

Land Use Change Consistently Reduces α- But Not β- and γ-Diversity of Bees.

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e.

How stressors disrupt honey bee biological traits and overwintering mechanisms.

High winter mortality of honey bees () has been observed in temperate regions over the past 30 years. Several biotic and abiotic stressors associated with winter colony losses have been identified, but the mechanisms and interactions underlying their effects remain unclear. We reviewed the effects of stressors on key overwintering biological traits, distinguishing between individual and colony traits.

The neonicotinoid acetamiprid reduces larval and adult survival in honeybees (Apis mellifera) and interacts with a fungicide mixture.

Plant protection products (PPPs), which are frequently used in agriculture, can be major stressors for honeybees. They have been found abundantly in the beehive, particularly in pollen. Few studies have analysed effects on honeybee larvae, and little is known about effects of insecticide-fungicide-mixtures, although this is a highly realistic exposure scenario.

Distance functions of carabids in crop fields depend on functional traits, crop type and adjacent habitat: a synthesis.

Natural pest and weed regulation are essential for agricultural production, but the spatial distribution of natural enemies within crop fields and its drivers are mostly unknown. Using 28 datasets comprising 1204 study sites across eight Western and Central European countries, we performed a quantitative synthesis of carabid richness, activity densities and functional traits in relation to field edges (i.e.

Reproduction of Varroa destructor depends on well-timed host cell recapping and seasonal patterns.

Resistance traits of honeybees (Apis mellifera) against their major parasite Varroa destructor have fascinated scientists and breeders for long. Nevertheless, the mechanisms underlying resistance are still largely unknown. The same applies to possible interactions between host behaviours, mite reproduction and seasonal differences.

Parasites, depredators, and limited resources as potential drivers of winter mortality of feral honeybee colonies in German forests.

Wild honeybees (Apis mellifera) are considered extinct in most parts of Europe. The likely causes of their decline include increased parasite burden, lack of high-quality nesting sites and associated depredation pressure, and food scarcity. In Germany, feral honeybees still colonize managed forests, but their survival rate is too low to maintain viable populations.

Seasonal and elevational changes of plant-pollinator interaction networks in East African mountains.

Across an elevation gradient, several biotic and abiotic factors influence community assemblages of interacting species leading to a shift in species distribution, functioning, and ultimately topologies of species interaction networks. However, empirical studies of climate-driven seasonal and elevational changes in plant-pollinator networks are rare, particularly in tropical ecosystems. Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity Hotspots in Kenya, East Africa.

A dataset of occurrence of wild bees and their interaction with foraging plants along a livestock grazing gradient of northern Tanzania.

A dataset describing the occurrence of wild bees and their interaction with forage plants along livestock grazing gradient is critical in understanding bee-plant interaction networks and in developing conservation plans to ensure ecosystem services in human-modified landscapes. Despite this need, bee-plant datasets are scarce in Africa, and Tanzania is no exception. Therefore, in this article, we present a dataset of wild bee species richness, occurrence, and distribution collected across sites with different levels of livestock grazing intensity and forage resources thereby.

Birds and bats enhance cacao yield despite suppressing arthropod mesopredation.

Bird- and bat-mediated biocontrol benefits the productivity of tropical commodity crops such as cacao, but the ecological interactions driving these ecosystem services remain poorly understood. Whereas birds and bats prey on herbivorous arthropods, they may also prey on arthropod mesopredators such as ants, with poorly understood consequences for pest biocontrol. We used a full-factorial experiment excluding birds, bats, and ants to assess their effects on (a) the abundance of multiple arthropod groups; (b) predation pressure on arthropods evaluated through artificial sentinel caterpillars; and (c) cacao yield over 1 year in shaded agroforestry systems of native cacao varieties in Peru.

Elevated ozone and carbon dioxide affects the composition of volatile organic compounds emitted by Vicia faba (L.) and visitation by European orchard bee (Osmia cornuta).

Recent studies link increased ozone (O3) and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels to alteration of plant performance and plant-herbivore interactions, but their interactive effects on plant-pollinator interactions are little understood. Extra floral nectaries (EFNs) are essential organs used by some plants for stimulating defense against herbivory and for the attraction of insect pollinators, e.g.

Plant species composition and local habitat conditions as primary determinants of terrestrial arthropod assemblages.

Arthropods respond to vegetation in multiple ways since plants provide habitat and food resources and indicate local abiotic conditions. However, the relative importance of these factors for arthropod assemblages is less well understood. We aimed to disentangle the effects of plant species composition and environmental drivers on arthropod taxonomic composition and to assess which aspects of vegetation contribute to the relationships between plant and arthropod assemblages.

Corrigendum: Honeybees are buffered against undernourishment during larval stages.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/finsc.2022.

Socio-ecological benefits of fine-flavor cacao in its center of origin.

In the tropics, combining food security with biodiversity conservation remains a major challenge. Tropical agroforestry systems are among the most biodiversity-friendly and productive land-use systems, and 70% of cocoa is grown by >6 million smallholder farmers living on <2$ per day. In cacao's main centre of diversification, the western Amazon region, interest is growing to achieve premium prices with the conversion of high-yielding, but mostly bulk-quality cacao to native fine-flavor cacao varieties, culturally important since pre-Columbian times.