Heat and desiccation tolerances predict bee abundance under climate change.

Abstract

Climate change could pose an urgent threat to pollinators, with critical ecological and economic consequences. However, for most insect pollinator species, we lack the long-term data and mechanistic evidence that are necessary to identify climate-driven declines and predict future trends. Here we document 16 years of abundance patterns for a hyper-diverse bee assemblage¹ in a warming and drying region², link bee declines with experimentally determined heat and desiccation tolerances, and use climate sensitivity models to project bee communities into the future. Aridity strongly predicted bee abundance for 71% of 665 bee populations (species × ecosystem combinations). Bee taxa that best tolerated heat and desiccation increased the most over time. Models forecasted declines for 46% of species and predicted more homogeneous communities dominated by drought-tolerant taxa, even while total bee abundance may remain unchanged. Such community reordering could reduce pollination services, because diverse bee assemblages typically maximize pollination for plant communities³. Larger-bodied bees also dominated under intermediate to high aridity, identifying body size as a valuable trait for understanding how climate-driven shifts in bee communities influence pollination⁴. We provide evidence that climate change directly threatens bee diversity, indicating that bee conservation efforts should account for the stress of aridity on bee physiology.