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Agriculturally dominated landscapes reduce bee phylogenetic diversity and pollination services
Ancestral history matters
Biodiversity is sometimes quantified purely by the number of species within a system that allow it to function to produce ecosystem services. Grab et al. show that simple species counting is too simplistic. They combined remotely sensed land-cover analyses and crop production records with an extensive 10-year pollinator community survey and a complete species-level phylogeny generated using genome-wide phylogenomic methods. They found that the equivalent of millions of years of pollinator evolution were lost in highly altered agricultural environments, which decreased pollination services above and beyond what would be expected from a simple numerical species count.
Science, this issue p. 282
Abstract
Land-use change threatens global biodiversity and may reshape the tree of life by favoring some lineages over others. Whether phylogenetic diversity loss compromises ecosystem service delivery remains unknown. We address this knowledge gap using extensive genomic, community, and crop datasets to examine relationships among land use, pollinator phylogenetic structure, and crop production. Pollinator communities in highly agricultural landscapes contain 230 million fewer years of evolutionary history; this loss was strongly associated with reduced crop yield and quality. Our study links landscape–mediated changes in the phylogenetic structure of natural communities to the disruption of ecosystem services. Measuring conservation success by species counts alone may fail to protect ecosystem functions and the full diversity of life from which they are derived.
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Science
Volume 363 | Issue 6424
18 January 2019
18 January 2019
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Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
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Received: 30 March 2018
Accepted: 12 December 2018
Published in print: 18 January 2019
Acknowledgments
We thank A. Agrawal for comments on the manuscript and J. Wilson for use of photographs in Fig. 1. We also thank E. Murray, S. Bossert, and C. Edwards for advice on analyses. Funding: Data collection was funded by USDA-AFRI (project 2010-03689) to B.N.D., USDA-ARS (project 2080-21000-015-00-D) to M.G.B., and an Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future grant to H.G. USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. Author contributions: H.G. conceived of the study, led the conceptual development, conducted analyses, and wrote the manuscript draft. M.G.B. conducted the molecular work and phylogenomic analyses. N.A. contributed to molecular work. K.R.U.-M. contributed to data analysis and fieldwork. M.G.P., J.G., B.N.D., and E.J.B. conducted the fieldwork. K.P., G.L., and B.N.D. contributed to study design. All authors contributed to the final manuscript. Competing interests: None declared. Data and materials availability: The data and R script files used in this study are available in Dryad (25). Raw sequence data and contigs representing ultraconserved element loci are available in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive and GenBank, respectively, under BioProject accession PRJNA454902. The bee specimens are housed in the Cornell University Insect Collection.
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Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future
USDA-NIFA-AFRI: 2010-03689
USDA-ARS: 2080-21000-015-00-D
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