A project undertaken at Macquarie University, and supervised by Carmen da Silva
Climates across Australia are getting warmer, more stochastic, and less predictable.
One of the most common ways to estimate species vulnerability to climate change is by estimating their lethal critical thermal limits (e.g. CTMAX), so that warming margins (the degrees distance between a species thermal limit and their maximum environmental temperature) can be calculated as a vulnerability metric. However, climate change is going to impact species’ life history traits before their lethal thermal limits are reached.
Estimating the shape of the relationship between species traits and environmental temperature (thermal performance curves) can provide important insights into how climate is already impacting species fitness, and how further anthropogenic climate change will impact species performance, behaviour, and geographic ranges.
Bees are the most important animal pollinators on Earth (pollinating approximately 80% of all flowering plants), and therefore underpin agricultural productivity and the functioning of ecosystems. There are over 1600 species of native bee in Australia which are known to be efficient and effective pollinators of many native and agricultural plants.
Native bees occupy all climatic regions across Australia, and it is imperative that we determine how changing climates will impact different species across different climatic regions, and to identify which species are the most and least resilient to further climate change. Flight (speed and endurance) is a critical trait for native bees for facilitating dispersal, resource acquisition, pollination, and predator escape.
We aim to determine the thermal performance curves of 24 different native bee species across the four main bee families (Apidae, Colletidae, Halictidae, and Magachilidae) within temperate, tropical, and arid environments in Australia. Determining how thermal performance curves vary across species with different geographic ranges will allow us to determine how climate change is impacting native bee ecology and pollination ability, and how species thermal physiology evolves.
This project will identify how climate change is already, and will continue to, impact Australia’s most important pollinators, and how agricultural and natural pollination services will be impacted in a changing world.