Bee community response to local and landscape factors along an urban-rural gradient

Over a third of the world’s crops require insect pollination, and reliance on pollination services for food continues to rise as human populations increase. Furthermore, as interest in urban agriculture has grown, so has a need for studies of urban pollinator ecology and pollination. Analyzing pollinator assemblages along a rural-urban gradient provides powerful mechanistic insight into how urbanization impacts pollinators. Yet, studies examining pollinators along urban-rural gradients are limited and results vary. Since pollinators vary tremendously in life history characteristics and respond to urbanization differently, studies from different regions would improve our understanding of pollinator response to urbanization. This study documents different bee assemblages along a high-plains semi-arid urban-rural gradient in Denver, Colorado, USA. Percent impervious surface was used to define the extent of urbanization at 12 sites and local and landscape characteristics were estimated using field assessments and geospatial analysis. Wild bees were collected and the relationships between urbanization and bee communities were explored using linear modeling. Overall, bee abundance and diversity decreased with increasing urbanization, suggesting that urban areas negatively impact bee communities. However, all bee guilds responded positively to local floral richness and negatively to the degree of landscape urbanization, suggesting that different types of bees responded similarly to urbanization. These findings suggest that providing a greater diversity of floral resources is key to mitigating the negative impacts of urbanization on pollinator communities.