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Monday 10 October 2016

Conservation Value and Permeability of Neotropical Oil Palm Landscapes for Orchid Bees

Published Date
Author
George Livingston ; Shalene Jha ; Andres Vega ; Lawrence Gilbert

Abstract

The proliferation of oil palm plantations has led to dramatic changes in tropical landscapes across the globe. However, relatively little is known about the effects of oil palm expansion on biodiversity, especially in key ecosystem-service providing organisms like pollinators. Rapid land use change is exacerbated by limited knowledge of the mechanisms causing biodiversity decline in the tropics, particularly those involving landscape features. We examined these mechanisms by undertaking a survey of orchid bees, a well-known group of Neotropical pollinators, across forest and oil palm plantations in Costa Rica. We used chemical baits to survey the community in four regions: continuous forest sites, oil palm sites immediately adjacent to forest, oil palm sites 2km from forest, and oil palm sites greater than 5km from forest. We found that although orchid bees are present in all environments, orchid bee communities diverged across the gradient, and community richness, abundance, and similarity to forest declined as distance from forest increased. In addition, mean phylogenetic distance of the orchid bee community declined and was more clustered in oil palm. Community traits also differed with individuals in oil palm having shorter average tongue length and larger average geographic range size than those in the forest. Our results indicate two key features about Neotropical landscapes that contain oil palm: 1) oil palm is selectively permeable to orchid bees and 2) orchid bee communities in oil palm have distinct phylogenetic and trait structure compared to communities in forest. These results suggest that conservation and management efforts in oil palm-cultivating regions should focus on landscape features. © 2013 Livingston et al.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere78523
JournalPLoS One
Volume8
Issue number10
StatePublished - Oct 17 2013

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 Bees
 
 Permeability
 
 Oils
 
 Forests
 
 Biodiversity
 Costa Rica
 
 Tongue
 
 Ecosystem

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all)
  • Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)
  • Medicine(all)

Cite this

Livingston, G., Jha, S., Vega, A., & Gilbert, L. (2013). Conservation Value and Permeability of Neotropical Oil Palm Landscapes for Orchid BeesPLoS One8(10), [e78523]. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078523

For further details log on website :
https://utexas.influuent.utsystem.edu/en/publications/conservation-value-and-permeability-of-neotropical-oil-palm-lands

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