Alana Pindar

I am a community ecologist who studies the impact of environmental stressors on wild bee communities.
Bees are the single most important taxonomic group of pollinators, comprised of more than 20,000 species essential to both agricultural production and maintaining wild plant diversity. Wild bees, and the pollination services they provide, appear to be in global decline with reported losses documented across multiple continents. Several causal factors for global bee declines have been suggested, including long-term anthropogenic land use change, climate change, parasites and pathogens, invasive species and the increasing use of agrochemicals. Whilst the scientific community has started to build consensus on how such environmental stress factors might affect bees, particularly honeybees and bumblebees, we know almost nothing about how these factors might affect wild bee communities. These wild bee communities have historically provided us with ‘free’ crop pollination services and it alarming to consider bee declines have already, or will in the future, lead to pollination deficits and reduced food production. We urgently need to understand how the full range of anthropogenic stressors could impact bee communities across a range of landscapes and spatial scales.