Project: Climate change and effect on Pollination Services

2018-01-01 – 2021-12-31

Abstract

Pollinators are one of the best examples on how biodiversity can be essential for ecosystem
resilience and for our own food safety. They participate to the ecosystem services of
pollination for a majority of our crops. Our food production depends on them. Unfortunately,
major pollinators like bees are threatened at a different intensity according to their species
and distribution. Their decline is associated to human activities and recent studies showed
that climate change is already a major threat for groups like bumblebees. Overall, we still
know very little on how climate can impact wild bees and the pollination services they
provide. The present project aims to fill that gap in knowledge at different levels: from the
field to the lab, from the gene to the colony, and from the species to the species community.
Our project provides several important novelties in proposing an integrative approach
combining the development of new models (i.e. wild bees) and explicit tests using existing
databases and laboratory experiments. Our hypothesis is that pollinator communities are
impacted by climate and will be affected by climate change in their composition and structure.
Future increase of temperatures will stress to various extents the processes of species
assemblages. We need evidence-based mitigation strategy to prepare our society to this major
disturbance.