By Yang Lan, Qing Zhao, Xin Zhang, Junlong Huang, Ying Shao, and Zhongli Chen.
Understanding how landscape structure and riparian vegetation impact bee diversity is important for maintaining pollination service in urban areas. Here, we explored variation of bee communities over space and time and across different land uses in a river zone of a mountainous megacity in 2018 and 2022, examined whether riverine vegetation functions as corridors that maintain gene flow of bee populations, and mapped pollination supply at the landscape scale. We found that abundance of bees and the Shannon index were significantly and positively correlated with the abundance of flowers on grassland and the area of forested land, respectively, while both were negatively correlated with the area of the building. Furthermore, the genetic differentiation of the bee communities in the riverine was lower than those outside, indicating the function of the riverine vegetation corridor. Finally, the pollination supply varied significantly between regions. The medium to high degree of pollination supply was distributed primarily in residual habitats, as well as in surrounding urban green spaces, while the pollination supply was low in the remaining areas. Our results stress the importance of maintaining the continuity of vegetation in riverine and increasing flower abundance, especially native plant species, for the conservation of bees in urban areas.
Relational Thinking 