Resampling native bee communities over 30 years showed stable trends along a tropical forest disturbance gradient

Nong, Qiaoyi

JOURNAL OF INSECT CONSERVATION

2026

30

3

Peng, YQ;Wenda, C

Understanding community changes in insect pollinators is challenging but essential to accurately evaluate ecosystem function and services under environmental changes. With historical datasets generally scarce in the Asian tropics, most resampling studies have focused on temperate or neotropical pollinators. Here, by resampling a native bee community sampled during 1993-1994 across habitat types in a seasonal tropical evergreen rainforest in China, we investigated diversity and community structure changes over 30 years. Although the current survey recorded over 40% higher species richness than historical sampling, after controlling for sampling effort, we found that native bee diversity in general is stable over time across habitats, except for a significant decline of dominant species due to increases of 4 native honeybee (Apis spp.) species in the most species-rich rainforest within the nature reserve. Although we detected significant community composition changes due to species gains from current communities for some sites, these sites were also under-sampled in historical sampling. However, when these under-sampled sites were removed and all habitats were combined, community structure did change. Despite our study areas showing increased mean air temperature and decreased accumulated precipitation change over the years, the effects of climates behind our observed difference are uncertain. Our results demonstrate the complexity of native bees' community changes in different habitats in Asian tropics and highlight the necessity of mechanistic understanding of tropical pollinators' responses to environmental changes.