Stuart P M Roberts

University of Reading · Department of Agriculture

Wild bees are declining, mainly due to the expansion of urban habitats that have led to land-use changes. Effects of urbanization on wild bee communities are still unclear, as shown by contrasting reports on their species and functional diversities in urban habitats. To address this current controversy, we built a large dataset, merging 16 surveys...

Bees are a diverse group with more than 1000 species known from the Iberian Peninsula. They have increasingly received special attention due to their important role as pollinators and providers of ecosystem services. In addition, various rapid human-induced environmental changes are leading to the decline of some of its populations. However, we kno...

Climate, landscape composition, management practice, and wild bee pollination are all variables thought to play significant roles in commercial apple production. However, how these variables affect production efficiency under field-realistic conditions has not been investigated at large geographical scales. We combined intensive standardized field...

Safeguarding crop pollination services requires the identification of the pollinator species involved and the provision of their ecological requirements at multiple spatial scales. However, the potential for agroecological intensification of pollinator-dependent crops by harnessing pollinator diversity is limited by our capacity to characterise the...

A two page summary of the article designed for wider audiences or very busy academics. Please feel free to distribute.

• Wild bees provide a critical ecosystem service by pollinating globally important crops. Documented bee declines, notably in agricultural landscapes, therefore threaten future food security. Yet, evaluations of methods to inventory bees are rarely carried out in different crops or focus specifically upon crop pollinating species. • We utilise stan...

In order to synthesize changes in pollinating insect communities across space and time, it is necessary to understand whether, and how, sampling methods influence assessments of community patterns. We compared how two common sampling methods-yellow combined flight traps and net sampling-influence our understanding of the species richness, abundance...

The importance of wild bees for crop pollination is well established, but less is known about which species contribute to service delivery to inform agricultural management, monitoring and conservation. Using sites in Great Britain as a case study, we use a novel qualitative approach combining ecological information and field survey data to establi...

A two page summary of the paper - this is designed for a non-acedemic audience. Pleasse feel free to disseminate. There is a QR Code for the paper itself included.

A recurrent concern in nature conservation is the potential competition for forage plants between wild bees and managed honey bees. Specifically, that the highly sophisticated system of recruitment and large perennial colonies of honey bees quickly exhaust forage resources leading to the local extirpation of wild bees. However, different species of...

Recent studies have reported on dramatic cases of aerial insect population declines by focusing on the measure of the total biomass of caught insects. However, there is currently no consensus about how biomass patterns among sites and habitats might consistently capture the subtleties of changes in aerial insect community structure. Here, we invest...

Widespread concern over declines in pollinating insects has led to numerous recommendations of which “pollinator-friendly” plants to grow and help turn urban environments into valuable habitat for such important wildlife. Whilst communicated widely by organisations and readily taken up by gardeners, the provenance, accuracy, specificity and timelin...

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 annex contains the information from stakeholder consultation we used to arrive at our final scheme designs in the main paper.

This annex is simply a list of the experts that we surveyed for the costs saved portion of the paper. They have all been sent a copy of the published paper.

This is a two page infographic version of the paper itself, designed for non-acedemic readers. Please feel free to distribute widely

This annex covers the responses to the exert questionnaire (Annex 5) - note that we did not use all the information we provided in this study because not all of it was readilly quantifiable.

This annex covers the methodology used in the power analysis to determine the size of the network we used in the main paper itself.

This annex covers the overlaps between the respones that the experts (annex 4) gave to the questionnaire (annex 5 and 6) and the site networks we proposed.

This annex is the survey sent to experts (annex 4) for the "costs saved" portion of the paper. Reminder that experts only saw 3 of the 8 reserach questions each to avoid overloading them. The survey was done in word or excel depending on respondent preferences but if you want to replicate it, it can be made in Bristol Online Survey, Survey Monkey o...

This annex covers the value of pollination services at a 100% loss of pollinators as opposed to the 30% loss that we use in the main paper.

This annex covers a few additional assumptions that were made duirng the economic valuation of polination services. These were not practical to overcome at the time but we hope can be relaxed in the future should better data become available

This annex covers the full costs of monitoring across all sites and years, buidling on the cost data from Annex 3 and the ower analysis in Annex 2 as well as the information in the main methods of the paper.

This is a complete review of all the literature concerning pollinator dependence in UK crops. If you are looking to do any sort of study on these crops, please feel free to use this as a starting point/reference list. New work is badly needed on runner beans and linseed in particular. There is also information on the price data transformations and...

This annex breaks down all the cost data we used in estimating the costs of the scheme (and the costs saved from having such a scheme). They are based on our typical suppliers in the UK so if you are based elsewhere, bear in mind that the UK is likely to be more expensive than many other countries so please either flag this up if you convert the fi...

This annex covers the full mathematical proof of the consumer surplus model we used in the paper. Please note that it is different from the one used in Gallai et al., 2009.

This annex covers the full cst benefit ratios of each monitoring scheme relative to the value of pollination services and the costs of reserach saved from having the scheme.

1. Resilient pollination services depend on sufficient abundance of pollinating insects over time. Currently, however, most knowledge about the status and trends of pollinators is based on changes in pollinator species richness and distribution only. 2. Systematic, long-term monitoring of pollinators is urgently needed to provide baseline informati...

We are currently facing a large decline in bee populations worldwide. Who are the winners and losers? Generalist bee species, notably those able to shift their diet to new or alternative floral resources, are expected to be among the least vulnerable to environmental change. However, studies of interactions between bees and plants over large tempor...

Cyprus, the third largest island in the Mediterranean, constitutes a biodiversity hotspot with high rates of plant endemism. The wild bees of the island were studied extensively by the native George Mavromoustakis, a world-renowned bee taxonomist, who collected extensively on the island from 1916 to 1957 and summarised his results in a series of ei...

1.The status of pollinating insects is of international concern, but knowledge of the magnitude and extent of declines is limited by a lack of systematic monitoring. Standardised protocols are urgently needed, alongside a better understanding of how different methods and recorders (data collectors) influence estimates of pollinator abundance and di...

Body size is an integral functional trait that underlies pollination‐related ecological processes, yet it is often impractical to measure directly. Allometric scaling laws have been used to overcome this problem. However, most existing models rely upon small sample sizes, geographically restricted sampling and have limited applicability for non‐bee...

Bee species worldwide are facing a future of further land-use change and intensification. Populations of closely-related species with similar ecological characteristics are likely to respond similarly to such pressures. Such phylogenetic signal in species' responses could undermine the stability of pollination services in agricultural and natural s...

Identifying private gardens in the U.K. as key sites of environmental engagement, we look at how a longer-term online citizen science programme facilitated the development of new and personal attachments of nature. These were visible through new or renewed interest in wildlife-friendly gardening practices and attitudinal shifts in a large proportio...

Insect pollinators are a key component of biodiversity; they also play a major role in the reproduction of many species of wild plants and crops. It is widely acknowledged that insect pollinators are threatened by many environmental pressures, mostly of anthropogenic nature. Their decline is a global phenomenon. A better understanding of their dist...

Insect pollinators are a key component of biodiversity; they also play a major role in the reproduction of many species of wild plants and crops. It is widely acknowledged that insect pollinators are threatened by many environmental pressures, mostly of anthropogenic nature. Their decline is a global phenomenon. A better understanding of their dist...

Body size is an integral functional trait that underlies pollination-related ecological processes, yet it is often impractical to measure directly. Allometric scaling laws have been used to overcome this problem. However, most existing models rely upon small sample sizes, geographically restricted sampling and have limited applicability for non-bee...

Andrena is a large genus of bees primarily distributed across the Holarctic. Despite their abundance in temperate regions, the pollen diets of many Nearctic Andrena remain incompletely resolved. The pollen diets of 50 species of Andrena found in Michigan were characterized using light microscopy. Twenty-four species (48%) were classified as pollen...

Report of the catches made by the European bee determination training (COST Super-B Project) in the Calanques National Park.

1.Land use change can disrupt associations between different trophic groups, but it is unclear if habitat restoration can recover these associations. In Sweden, restoration efforts have been applied to increase areas of semi‐natural grassland previously remaining as small fragments due to abandonment. We assessed how the associations between plant...

After habitat restoration, species need to recolonize from existing populations. The ability of species to recolonize restored habitats likely depends on their traits. This study aimed to test if species traits and isolation from source habitat can explain the presence of insects in restored grasslands. We surveyed the occurrence of hoverflies and...

An update on Sitaris muralis (Forster) is now appropriate, as a lot has happened since the species was rediscovered in Britain in Brockenhurst, South Hampshire in 2010 (Brock, 2010), which also provided a brief summary of British records. Sitaris muralis is one of Britain's rarest beetles, assessed as Red List, Vulnerable (Alexander et al., 2014)....

Loss of habitat area and diversity poses a threat to communities of wild pollinators and flowering plants in agricultural landscapes. Pollinators, such as wild bees, and insect-pollinated plants are two groups of organisms that closely interact. Nevertheless, it is still not clear how species richness and functional diversity, in terms of pollinati...

The loss of key forage plants and a narrow pollen diet have both been implicated in the decline of wild bees over the past 70 years. These ideas have been studied extensively in recent years in bumblebees (Bombus spp.), but have rarely been investigated in other bee groups, due in part to a lack of detailed ecological data for many species of wild...

Aim Agricultural intensification and urbanization are important drivers of biodiversity change in Europe. Different aspects of bee community diversity vary in their sensitivity to these pressures, as well as independently influencing ecosystem service provision (pollination). To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of human impacts on bee dive...

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...

Many bumblebee (Bombus) species are undergoing a strong decline in Europe due to, amongst other things, a decrease of food resources. While leguminous plants (Fabaceae) are considered to be one of the main pollen sources of bumblebees, thistles (Asteraceae tribe Cardueae) have been suggested to be important for male diet. Yet, several European coun...

Habitat restoration is a key measure to counteract negative impacts on biodiversity from habitat loss and fragmentation. To assess success in restoring not only biodiversity, but also functionality of communities, we should take into account the re-assembly of species trait composition across taxa. Attaining such functional restoration would depend...

Mass-flowering crops lead to spatial redistributions of pollinators and to transient shortages within nearby semi-natural grasslands, but the impacts on plant-pollinator interactions remain largely unexplored. Here, we characterised which pollinator species are attracted by oilseed rape and how this affected the structure of plant-pollinator networ...

The species composition within communities is highly dependent on the rate of species immigration and whether immigrating species possess the functional traits required by the prevailing environmental conditions. Once established, random fluctuations in birth and death rates may reduce the diversity of ecologically equivalent species if local popul...

Mass-flowering crops (MFCs) are increasingly cultivated and might influence pollinator communities in MFC fields and nearby semi-natural habitats (SNHs). Across six European regions and 2 years, we assessed how landscape-scale cover of MFCs affected pollinator densities in 408 MFC fields and adjacent SNHs. In MFC fields, densities of bumblebees, so...

Factors associated with agricultural intensification, for example, loss of seminatural vegetation and pesticide use has been shown to adversely affect the bee community. These factors may impact the bee community differently at different landscape scales. The scale dependency is expected to be more pronounced in heterogeneous landscapes. However, t...

Appendix S1: Diversity data set (including details and references for data used in this study). Table S1: Search terms. Table S1.2: Data sources and sample sizes, with references. Table S1.3: Land‐use class and intensity definitions. Figure S1.1: Map of sites used in analysis. Appendix S2: Species traits data set. Appendix S2.1: List of speci...

To assess the ability of traditional biological recording schemes and lay citizen science approaches to gather data on species distributions and changes therein, we examined bumblebee records from the UK’s national repository (National Biodiversity Network) and from BeeWatch. The two recording approaches revealed similar relative abundances of bumb...

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...

Bees are a functionally important and economically valuable group, but are threatened by land‐use conversion and intensification. Such pressures are not expected to affect all species identically; rather, they are likely to be mediated by the species' ecological traits. Understanding which types of species are most vulnerable under which land uses...

For many species, geographical ranges are expanding toward the poles in response to climate change, while remaining stable along range edges nearest the equator. Using long-term observations across Europe and North America over 110 years, we tested for climate change–related range shifts in bumblebee species across the full extents of their latitud...

In 2013, an opportunity arose in England to develop an agri-environment package for wild pollinators, as part of the new Countryside Stewardship scheme launched in 2015. It can be understood as a ‘policy window’, a rare and time-limited opportunity to change policy, supported by a narrative about pollinator decline and widely supported mitigating a...