The landscape ecology of bees visiting squash in a heavily forested temperate region

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Urbanowicz, Christine
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography

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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.

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... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in the Department of Geography.

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