Thesis
Impacts of Human-Altered Landscape on Bee Community Stability
Washington State University
Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005360
Abstract
Wild bees are integral to the environment due to the pollination services they provide. As human-mediated landscape change exponentially continues, we must assess how shifting landscapes affect bee communities. Assessing the stability of these communities allows us to understand how landscape change alters vital community features such as diversity and structure over time. I evaluated this in two studies that use different landscapes and determinations of stability. The first chapter is an assessment of stability in response to the introduction t of canola crops as a novel, pulse-blooming resource. I show that bee communities were not strongly impacted by canola as expected, which may be due to the high composition of solitary, range restricted bee species in the Palouse ecosystem. My second chapter explores bee community stability in urban agroecosystems. I found that urbanization improves some stability-related metrics of communities. This is likely through introducing a higher biodiversity of plants and selecting for generalist bee species. Overall, this body of work contributes to our understanding of bee community ecology by showing that in some cases, stability is dependent on habitat-level resources and may be mediated by community composition.
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Details
- Title
- Impacts of Human-Altered Landscape on Bee Community Stability
- Creators
- Olivia Shaffer
- Contributors
- David W. Crowder (Advisor)Silas Bossert (Committee Member)Tobin D. Northfield (Committee Member)Javier Gutierrez Illan (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Entomology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 82
- Identifiers
- 99901031038701842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis