The high climatic risk of European bumblebees
Year: 2016
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Thanks to intensive survey, we have now in hands a comprehensive biogeographical dataset for Palaearctic bumblebees. That allows to compute their climatic envelope and to integrate different climatic scenarios. The result shows a high risk of strong diversity and abundance loss for these insects. As they are key-pollinators in Arctic, Boreal and most temperate biomes, this is clearly a main threat against Northern biomes. Detailed local survey show that bumblebees are especially sensitive to heat waves. That means that the simple computing of climatic envelopes based on temperature and precipitation means would lead to significant biases. We first need to better understand what actually kills bumblebees. The researches follow several tracks : - refined climatic envelope models that take into account the intra-specific differentiation; - heat-stress bioassays to identify which species are the most sensitive; - ethological study on colonies exposed to different temperature; - latitudinal and altitudinal transects to check the population moves; - circumpolar survey to verify the possible diferentiation of extreme event resistance of population along continentality gradient. Even species like Bombus terrestris look threatened while it is a species closely associated to most agricultural landscapes and activities. This questions the survival of agriculture in large areas of Europe. Through the climatic risk of bumblebees we question the survival of our civilization itself.
Source: ORBi UMONS
Author: Rasmont, Pierre
Institution: University of Mons
Language: English
Topic: Plant and animal studies
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Life on land, Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2885249122