Agriculturally dominated landscapes reduce bee phylogenetic diversity and pollination services

Abstract

Ancestral history matters Biodiversity is sometimes quantified purely by the number of species within a system that allow it to function to produce ecosystem services. Grab et al. show that simple species counting is too simplistic. They combined remotely sensed land-cover analyses and crop production records with an extensive 10-year pollinator community survey and a complete species-level phylogeny generated using genome-wide phylogenomic methods. They found that the equivalent of millions of years of pollinator evolution were lost in highly altered agricultural environments, which decreased pollination services above and beyond what would be expected from a simple numerical species count. Science , this issue p. 282