The landscape ecology of bees visiting squash in a heavily forested temperate region Public Deposited
- Last Modified
- March 20, 2019
- Creator
-
Urbanowicz, Christine
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography
- Abstract
- There is increasing interest to understand how to conserve bees that pollinate crops. My research examined local and landscape-scale effects on the diversity and abundance of bees visiting yellow squash and zucchini flowers in the piedmont of North Carolina. Explanatory models were constructed using variables related to field-level floral resources, landscape composition, and landscape configuration. Bee diversity, measured as species richness, was positively correlated with the abundance of flowers in a field and the clumpiness of wooded land and was negatively correlated with proportion of developed area around a field. The abundance of bees visiting zucchini, measured as visitation rate, was negatively correlated with the proportion of wooded land around a field, but no models could explain variation in visitation rate for yellow squash. This research demonstrates that efforts to conserve bee diversity need to consider the importance of land-management decisions made within a field and across a landscape.
- Date of publication
- May 2012
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in the Department of Geography.
- Advisor
- Moody, Aaron
- Language