“Wild bees are the top pollinators in most temperate regions, and widespread declines have prompted worries about food security as well as ecosystem function.” Rivers emphasized the importance of understanding bees’ habitat requirements and their response to human activity for effective conservation measures. Oregon is home to more than 600 species of native bees, with almost a quarter of them found in recently harvested forests. Native insect pollinators, primarily bees, are estimated to provide over $3 billion per year in commercial pollination services in the United States. She also highlighted that their research is among the first attempts to quantify how native bee communities change over time after a dominant forest disturbance in the Oregon Coast Range.īees are essential pollinators for nearly 90% of the Earth’s flowering plants, including many food crops, and contribute to insect and plant biodiversity. Zitomer explained the significance of these findings: “Our results are important for forest managers because they indicate that bees do use intensively harvested stands, and that the window for bee conservation measures is restricted to a relatively short time period.” They discovered that both the total number of bees and the number of different bee species dropped significantly with stand age, with an average decline of 61% and 48%, respectively, for each five-year increment after harvest. To conduct their research, the team examined native bee communities in 60 Douglas-fir stands of varying ages across a time frame representative of a typical 40-year harvest rotation during the spring and summer of 20. The scientists emphasize the need to close this knowledge gap, as bees play a vital role in pollinating many of the flowering plants that make up ecosystems and support food webs. He added that promoting open conditions and enhancing floral resources in the initial years following harvest are likely to encourage bee diversity in intensively managed forest landscapes.ĭespite growing concern over how human activity may be driving global declines in pollinator species, the impacts of land management practices on wild bees outside of agricultural systems remain largely unknown. “The research demonstrates that Douglas-fir plantations develop diverse communities of wild bees shortly after harvest,” said Rivers. The study, led by graduate student Rachel Zitomer and Jim Rivers, an animal ecologist in the OSU College of Forestry, was published in Ecological Applications. This study contributes to the understanding of forest management’s potential role in conserving crucial pollinator groups. Research conducted by Oregon State University has revealed that native bee populations in the Oregon Coast Range are flourishing in clearcut areas within a few years of timber harvest, only to experience a drastic decline as the forest canopy closes.
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