Jacobus C Biesmeijer

• Managing Director at Naturalis Biodiversity Center

Studies have found that biotic information can play an important role in shaping the distribution of species even at large scales. However, results from species distribution models are not always consistent among studies and the underlying factors that influence the importance of biotic information to distribution models, are unclear. We studied wi...

Apples are one of the most important global crops that relies heavily on insect pollination, which has been shown to increase apple production and value. However, recent reports indicate that apple production has been declining in certain regions, including in Bhutan. One of the potential causes of declining production are pollination deficits driv...

In a warming climate, species are expected to shift their geographical ranges to higher elevations and latitudes, and if interacting species shift at different rates, networks may be disrupted. To quantify the effects of ongoing climate change, repeating historical biodiversity surveys is necessary. In this study, we compare the distribution of a p...

This report presents the proposal for an EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (EU-PoMS), based on the findings of an expert group of 21 people from 12 European countries. The EU-PoMS delivers of a cost-effective Core Scheme, which includes the most relevant taxa, is able to detect changes in the status of pollinators, has EU-wide coverage, and uses stan...

Pollinator communities exhibit variable responses to changing landscape composition. A general expectation is that a decreasing cover of semi-natural habitats negatively affects pollinator reproduction, population size and pollination services, but few studies have investigated the simultaneous effects of landscape complexity on different aspects o...

Aim: Biodiversity is rapidly disappearing at local and global scales also affecting the functional diversity of ecosystems. We aimed to assess whether functional diversity was correlated with species diversity and whether both were affected by similar land use and vegetation structure drivers. Better understanding of these relationships will allow...

Animal pollination can impact food security since many crops depend on pollinators to produce fruits and seeds. However, the effects of projected climate change on crop pollinators and therefore on crop production are still unclear, especially for wild pollinators and aggregate community responses. Using species distributional modeling, we assessed...

Pollinator species of each agricultural crop analyzed. Each crop presents different dependence for animal pollination (Giannini et al. 2015b). Pollinator species used here were previously considered as being effective, occasional or potential pollinators of each analyzed crop (Giannini et al. 2015a). (DOCX)

Data sources retrieved from speciesLink and GBIF website. (DOCX)

Shifts on pollinators’ occurrence probability for all crops analyzed (13 crops) considering A) the overall average of decrease in probability; B) the number and percentage of municipalities that will potentially face decrease or increase on pollinators’ occurrence probability (total number of municipalities analyzed equals to 4975). (DOCX)

Municipalities that will potentially face the highest negative shift on pollinators’ occurrence probability and that present the highest percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) associated to the analyzed crops. We considered 25% of the highest values of negative shift on pollinators and, from those, the 15 municipalities that present the highest...

Bumblebees in Europe have been in steady decline since the 1900s. This decline is expected to continue with climate change as the main driver. However, at the local scale, land use and land cover (LULC) change strongly affects the occurrence of bumblebees. At present, LULC change is rarely included in models of future distributions of species. This...

Ecological processes operating on large spatio‐temporal scales are difficult to disentangle with traditional empirical approaches. Alternatively, researchers can take advantage of ‘natural’ experiments, where experimental control is exercised by careful site selection. Recent advances in developing protocols for designing these ‘pseudo‐experiments’...

Aim Species distribution models are often used to project species distributions to different environmental conditions. However, most models do not consider whether the importance of abiotic factors may change over time. If they change, this has implications for the assessment of how abiotic changes affect species distributions. Here, we use spatial...

Wild and managed pollinators provide a wide range of benefits to society in terms of contributions to food security, farmer and beekeeper livelihoods, social and cultural values, as well as the maintenance of wider biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Pollinators face numerous threats, including changes in land-use and management intensity, climat...

Most of the world’s wild flowering plants (87.5%) are pollinated by insects and other animals (established but incomplete), more than three quarters of the leading types of global food crops can benefit, at least in part, from animal pollination (well established) and it is estimated that about one-third of global food volume produced similarly ben...

IPBES

The effects of floral species composition on offspring performance of solitary bees are rarely studied under conditions where foraging behaviour of mothers is allowed to play a role. In a semi-field experiment, we restricted foraging choices of the polylectic mason bee Osmia bicornis L. to flower species belonging to plant families presumably used...

Insect pollination underpins apple production but the extent to which different pollinator guilds supply this service, particularly across different apple varieties, is unknown. Such information is essential if appropriate orchard management practices are to be targeted and proportional to the potential benefits pollinator species may provide. Here...

Changes in climate and land use can have important impacts on biodiversity. Species respond to such environmental modifications by adapting to new conditions or by shifting their geographic distributions towards more suitable areas. The latter might be constrained by species' functional traits that influence their ability to move, reproduce or esta...

Nature Communications 6: Article number: 741410.1038/ncomms8414 (2015); Published: June162015; Updated: February182016. The authors inadvertently omitted Kimiora L. Ward, who managed and contributed data, from the author list. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

In moderne cultuurlandschappen wordt het voor wilde bijen steeds moeilijker om de benodigde hulpbronnen, zoals bloemen en nestgelegenheid te bemachtigen. Wij willen nagaan of de aanleg van meerjarige bloemenvelden de achteruitgang van wilde bijen in deze landschappen kan tegengaan. De resultaten laten zien dat het verhogen van het aanbod van bloeme...

Increasing pressures on natural areas and limited conservation budgets require, particularly in rural landscapes in the Western world, an immediate answer to the question how much natural area is required to provide a sustainable future for wild plant and animal species on farmland. The European Union proposed in its Common Agricultural Policy that...

Our review looks at pollinator conservation and highlights the differences in approach between managing for pollination services and preserving pollinator diversity. We argue that ecosystem service management does not equal biodiversity conservation, and that maintaining species diversity is crucial in providing ecosystem resilience in the face of...

Species distribution models (SDM) are increasingly used to understand the factors that regulate variation in biodiversity patterns and to help plan conservation strategies. However, these models are rarely validated with independently collected data and it is unclear whether SDM performance is maintained across distinct habitats and for species wit...

Context Loss of natural habitat can isolate pollinator populations and negatively affect sexual reproduction of animal-pollinated plants. Objective We evaluated how the loss of natural forest affects pollinator diversity in the understory of the Atlantic Rainforest in Northeastern Brazil. Methods We focused on bees, the main group of pollinators fo...

Pollinators play an important role in ecosystem functioning, affecting also crop production. Their decline may hence lead to serious ecological and economic impacts, making it essential to understand the processes that drive pollinator shifts in space and time. Land-use changes are thought to be one of the most important drivers of pollinators’ los...

There is compelling evidence that more diverse ecosystems deliver greater benefits to people, and these ecosystem services have become a key argument for biodiversity conservation. However, it is unclear how much biodiversity is needed to deliver ecosystem services in a cost-effective way. Here we show that, while the contribution of wild bees to c...

Change in land cover is thought to be one of the key drivers of pollinator declines, and yet there is a dearth of studies exploring the relationships between historical changes in land cover and shifts in pollinator communities. Here, we explore, for the first time, land cover changes in England over more than 80 years, and relate them to concurren...

Aim To quantify spatio‐temporal changes in species richness and assemblage composition of Danish butterflies over more than 100 years and to assess whether different functional groups of butterflies show different temporal trajectories. Location Denmark, Europe. Methods We applied species accumulation curves to estimate relative species richness...

Presence of diploid males in wild bees reflects inbreeding and provides information about the health status of a colony or population. Detection of diploid males, and discrimination from haploid males and workers, has, however, been limited to molecular diagnostics. Here we present a novel method based on differences in wing shape, e.g., venation p...

Presence of diploid males in wild bees reflects inbreeding and provide information about the health status of a colony or population. Detection of diploid males, and discrimination from haploid males and workers has, however, been limited to molecular diagnostics. Here we present a novel method based on differences in wing shape, e.g. venation patt...

De bestuiving van landbouwgewassen door gehouden en in het wild levende soorten bijen en zweefvliegen vormt een relevante en veelgenoemde ecosysteemdienst, die echter onder toenemende druk staat. De honingbijen die traditioneel landbouwgewassen bestuiven, gaan in aantal sterk achteruit als gevolg van te hoge sterfte, met name gedurende de winterper...

Co-flowering plant species commonly share flower visitors, and thus have the potential to influence each other's pollination. In this study we analysed 750 quantitative plant-pollinator networks from 28 studies representing diverse biomes worldwide. We show that the potential for one plant species to influence another indirectly via shared pollinat...

Feral honey bee populations have been reported to be in decline due to the spread of Varroa destructor, an ectoparasitic mite that when left uncontrolled leads to virus build-up and colony death. While pests and diseases are known causes of large-scale managed honey bee colony losses, no studies to date have considered the wider pathogen burden in...

Competition between managed honeybees and wild pollinators is thought to be a key factor in structuring foraging communities on flowers. The majority of studies have focused on impacts such as floral visitation rates and resource overlap. However, direct measurement of fitness is required to fully assess the impacts of competition. We compared in 2...

Data S1.Climate-driven spatial mismatches between British orchards and their pollinators: increased risks of pollination deficits.

Understanding how climate change can affect crop-pollinator systems helps predict potential geographical mismatches between a crop and its pollinators, and therefore identify areas vulnerable to loss of pollination services. We examined the distribution of orchard species (apples, pears, plums and other top fruits) and their pollinators in Great Br...

Insect pollination is important for food production globally and apples are one of the major fruit crops which are reliant on this ecosystem service. It is fundamentally important that the full range of benefits of insect pollination to crop production are understood, if the costs of interventions aiming to enhance pollination are to be compared ag...

Apple production in the UK is worth over £100 million per annum and this production is heavily dependent on insect pollination. Despite its importance, it is not clear which insect pollinators carry out the majority of this pollination. Furthermore, it is unknown whether current UK apple production, in terms of both yield and quality, suffers polli...

Declines in insect pollinators across Europe have raised concerns about the supply of pollination services to agriculture. Simultaneously, EU agricultural and biofuel policies have encouraged substantial growth in the cultivated area of insect pollinated crops across the continent. Using data from 41 European countries, this study demonstrates that...

Pollinating insects provide crucial and economically important ecosystem services to crops and wild plants, but pollinators, particularly bees, are globally declining as a result of various driving factors, including the prevalent use of pesticides for crop protection. Sublethal pesticide exposure negatively impacts numerous pollinator life‐history...

Insect pollination benefits over three quarters of the world's major crops. There is growing concern that observed declines in pollinators may impact on production and revenues from animal pollinated crops. Knowing the distribution of pollinators is therefore crucial for estimating their availability to pollinate crops; however, in general, we have...

Terrestrial invertebrate species play a dominant role in the trophic dynamics of agricultural ecosystems. Subtle changes in the composition of communities and species interactions at different trophic levels, and role of ecosystem engineers can dramatically modify the effects of invertebrates on plant productivity in agricultural systems. The effec...

Nutrient availability in ecosystems has increased dramatically over the last century. Excess reactive nitrogen deposition is known to negatively impact plant communities, e.g. by changing species composition, biomass and vegetation structure. In contrast, little is known on how such impacts propagate to higher trophic levels. To evaluate how nitrog...

Number of grid cells resulting from applying the criteria in case of ten-year periods. As an alternative to the fifteen-year periods, also ten-year periods were examined to explore the possible trade off between the criteria (see text of methods section) used. Limiting the fifteen-year periods by removing the five earliest years decreases the chanc...

Orthoptera traits. Data on Orthoptera species traits, derived from the distribution atlas [8] and from the expert knowledge of European Invertebrate Survey - Netherlands. (DOC)

Number of grid cells resulting from applying the criteria to the trait-based subsets of Orthoptera species. See text of methods section for a description of the criteria (a-c). The trait-based subsets of Orthoptera species logically produced lower numbers of grid cells compared to the full set of Orthoptera species (Table 1). (DOC)

Apple production in the UK is worth over £100 million per annum and this production is heavily dependent on insect pollination. Despite its importance, it is not clear which insect pollinators carry out the majority of this pollination. Furthermore, it is unknown whether current UK apple production, in terms of both yield and quality, suffers po...

Pollination is an essential process in the sexual reproduction of seed plants and a key ecosystem service to human welfare. Animal pollinators decline as a consequence of five major global change pressures: climate change, landscape alteration, agricultural intensification, non-native species, and spread of pathogens. These pressures, which differ...

Biotic interactions have been considered as an important factor to be included in species distribution modelling, but little is known about how different types of interaction or different strategies for modelling affect model performance. This study compares different methods for including interspecific interactions in distribution models for bees,...

Concern about biodiversity loss has led to increased public investment in conservation. Whereas there is a widespread perception that such initiatives have been unsuccessful, there are few quantitative tests of this perception. Here, we evaluate whether rates of biodiversity change have altered in recent decades in three European countries (Great B...

Understanding species distributions and the factors limiting them is an important topic in ecology and conservation, including in nature reserve selection and predicting climate change impacts. While Species Distribution Models (SDM) are the main tool used for these purposes, choosing the best SDM algorithm is not straightforward as these are plent...

Deviance from the average variable contribution per variable and algorithm depending on the number of records. R represents the correlation values between these two variables. Only significant correlations are presented. Significance codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05. (TIF)

Different approaches for producing SDMs are exemplified by the large variety of algorithms used. In 42 publications from 2012 containing the words “Species Distribution Models” in the title for 2012 (ISI Web of Knowledge, until 26/06/2012) the studies used 19 different algorithms. These studies focus on different aspect of the modelling process (wi...

Statistical results of the Linear Mixed Effects models for the deviance from the average environmental variable contribution values between algorithms without separating by variable (environmental variable nested in species). (DOCX)

Distribution of the records locations of hoverfly species in the Netherlands. All the localities where hoverflies hove been found are represented by the orange colour. Blue represents the distribution of the locations for the species modelled in this study. (TIF)

Representation of the environmental space occupied by the modelled species (for the 10 environmental variables used, in different colours representing the species) and the available environmental conditions in the complete study area (graphs in red colour). The selected species cover the vast majority of Netherlands environmental space. The “x” axi...

Variation of model fit (i.e. AUC scores) per algorithm per species in the ten repetition runs. In the graph every number of records corresponds to a species. Values below the dotted line correspond to predictions that are not better than random. See Table 1 and S4 for further details. (TIF)

Environmental variables used for fitting the SDM. (DOCX)

Statistical results of the Linear Mixed Effect models for the maps similarity values at the medium scale (Improved Fuzzy Kappa) between algorithms and their interaction with the number of records and their spatial distribution. (DOCX)

Statistical results of the Linear Mixed Effect models for the maps similarity values at the coarser scale (Fuzzy Global Matching) between algorithms and their interaction with the number of records and their spatial distribution. (DOCX)

Statistical results of the Linear Mixed Effect models results for the deviance from the average environmental variable contribution values between algorithms for the same variable. (DOCX)

Example of the data overfitting problematic for one of the RF models. Cells in green represent areas predicted as presences and in grey are the areas predicted as absences, the black dots represent presence records used during the training of the models. The overfitting occurs and the “presences” predictions are mostly constrained to the training r...

Deviance from the average variable contribution per variable depending on the records’ spatial distribution. R represents the correlation values between these two variables. Only significant correlations are presented. Significance codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05. (TIF)

Description of the species data used for fitting the models. (DOCX)

Statistical results of the Linear Mixed Effect models for the AUC values between algorithms and their interaction with the number of records and spatial distribution. (DOCX)

Statistical results of the Linear Mixed Effect models for the maps similarity values at the finer scale (Kappa) between algorithms and their interaction with the number of records and their spatial distribution. (DOCX)

Insect pollinators of crops and wild plants are under threat globally and their decline or loss could have profound economic and environmental consequences. Here, we argue that multiple anthropogenic pressures – including land-use intensification, climate change, and the spread of alien species and diseases – are primarily responsible for insect-po...

To manage agroecosystems for multiple ecosystem services, we need to know whether the management of one service has positive, negative, or no effects on other services. We do not yet have data on the interactions between pollination and pest-control services. However, we do have data on the distributions of pollinators and natural enemies in agroec...

1. In response to evidence of insect pollinator declines, organisations in many sectors, including the food and farming industry, are investing in pollinator conservation. They are keen to ensure that their efforts use the best available science. 2. We convened a group of 32 ‘conservation practitioners’ with an active interest in pollinators and 16...

This study focuses on three main groups of organisms: soil invertebrates, biological control agents (BCAs) and pollinators. These groups play key roles in agricultural systems, and have the potential to be used, moved or manipulated for the benefit of agriculture. Soil invertebrates are a key component of agricultural landscapes. They participate i...

Although an extensive research has been done on the contribution of wild insects to apple pollination, most of these studies did not evaluate the effect of the surrounding landscape context on local pollinator communities. Our aim was to compare communities of wild bees in 31 equally managed apple orchards located in three contrasting landscape typ...