University of California Santa Barbara, California
It is well documented that bees and plants are both altering their phenology in response to changing climate conditions. However, the cumulative effects of various phenological responses among both bee and plant taxa may impact not only the timing of individual species, but the degree of synchrony between historically interacting bees and flowers. As a result, recent warming has the potential to systematically alter the availability of floral resources to native bees through changes in the number of plant taxa that are flowering during each day of a bee’s flight period. By leveraging millions of digitized museum specimens of both bees and angiosperm taxa, we conduct a systematic evaluation of the effects of climate changes throughout the 20th century on the availability of floral resources to native bees on Santa Cruz Island, a well-studied island ecosystem off the coast of southern California. Further, we evaluate the degree to which diet breadth of bee taxa may impact the potential for disruptions to floral resource availability to bee taxa by evaluating the degree of reduction in floral resource availability that has occurred among generalist versus specialist bee taxa.
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