Earle Gorton Linsley

The Mojave and Sonoran Deserts, recognized as a global hotspot for bee biodiversity, are experiencing habitat degradation from urbanization, utility‐scale solar energy (USSE) development, and climate change. In this study, we evaluated the current and future distribution of bee diversity, assessed how protected areas safeguard bee species richness, and predicted how global change may affect bees across the region. Using Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs) of 148 bee species, we project changes in species distributions, occurrence area, and richness under four global change scenarios between 1971 and 2050. We evaluated the threat posed by USSE development and predicted how climate change will affect the suitability of protected areas for conservation. Our findings indicate that changes in temperature and precipitation do not uniformly affect bee richness. Lower elevation protected areas are projected to experience mean losses of up to 5.8 species, whereas protected areas at higher elevations and transition zones may gain up to 7.8 species. Areas prioritized for future USSE development have an average species richness of 4.2 species higher than the study area average, and lower priority “variance” areas have 8.2 more species. USSE zones are expected to experience declines of up to 8.0 species by 2050 due to climate change alone. Despite the importance of solitary bees for pollination, their diversity is often overlooked in land management decisions. Our results show the utility of JSDMs for leveraging existing collection records to ease the inclusion of data‐limited insect species in land management decision‐making.

Predicting global change effects poses significant challenges due to the intricate interplay between climate change and anthropogenic stressors in shaping ecological communities and their function, such as pest outbreak risk. Termites are ecosystem engineers, yet some pest species are causing worldwide economic losses. While habitat fragmentation seems to drive pest-dominated termite communities, its interaction with climate change effect remains unknown. We test whether climate and habitat fragmentation interactively alter interspecific competition that may limit pest termite risk. Leveraging global termite co-occurrence including 280 pest species, we found that competitively superior termite species (e.g., large bodied) increased in large and continuous habitats solely at high precipitation. While competitive species suppressed pest species globally, habitat fragmentation drove pest termite risk only in humid biomes. Unfortunately, hu- mid tropics have experienced vast forest fragmentation and rainfall reduction over the past decades. These stressors, if not stopped, may drive pest termite risk, potentially via competitive release.

To date, the knowledge of bee diversity in the Baja California Peninsula has primarily relied on large, sporadic expeditions from the first half of the 20th century. To address the knowledge gaps, we conducted extensive fieldwork from 2019 to 2023, visited entomological collections in Mexico and USA, and accessed digital databases and community science platforms to compile records. As a result of our field surveys, we identified 521 morphospecies, with 350 recognized as valid species, including 96 new records for the Baja California Peninsula and 68 new findings for Mexico, including the rediscovery of Megachile seducta Mitchell, 1934, ranked as possibly extinct. Additionally, museum visits added 24 new species records for the peninsula, including 12 new to Mexico. Integrating the new and existing records results in a comprehensive checklist that documents 728 species for the peninsula, 613 for Baja California, and 300 for Baja California Sur. Notably, 62 species are endemic to the peninsula, of which 22 are only found in Baja California, and 23 in Baja California Sur. Our findings show a greater bee diversity in northern latitudes, with a sharp decrease to the central and southern peninsula, which corresponds to the geographic distribution of the records. This supports the premise that the Baja California peninsula remains an unexplored area and highlights the importance of conducting studies like the one presented here.  

BACKGROUND Kissing bugs are the vectors of Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas disease (CD). Despite their epidemiological relevance, kissing bug species are under sampled in terms of their diversity and it is unclear what biases exist in available kissing bug data. Under climate change, range maps for kissing bugs may become less accurate as species shift their ranges to track climatic tolerance. OBJECTIVES Quantify inventory completeness in available kissing bug data. Assess how well range maps are at conveying information about current distributions and potential future distributions subject to shift under climate change. Intersect forecasted changes in kissing bug distributions with contemporary sampling gaps to identify regions for future sampling of the group. Identify whether a phylogenetic signal is present in expert range knowledge as more closely related species may be similarly well or lesser understood. METHODS We used species distribution models (SDM), specifically constructed from Bayesian additive regression trees, with Bioclim variables, to forecast kissing bug distributions into 2100 and intersect these with current sampling gaps to identify priority regions for sampling. Expert range maps were assessed by the agreement between the expert map and SDM generated occurrence probability. We used classical hypothesis testing methods as well as tests of phylogenetic signal to meet our objectives. FINDINGS Expert range maps vary in their quality of depicting current kissing bug distributions. Most expert range maps decline in their ability to convey information about kissing bug occurrence over time, especially in under sampled areas. We found limited evidence for a phylogenetic signal in expert range map performance. MAIN CONCLUSIONS Expert range maps are not a perfect account of species distributions and may degrade in their ability to accurately convey distribution knowledge under future climates. We identify regions where future sampling of kissing bugs will be crucial for completing biodiversity inventories.

The solitary oil-collecting bees of the tribes Centridini, Tapinotaspidini, and Tetrapediini inhabit areas from the southern part of the Nearctic Region through the Patagonian in southern South America, including the Caribbean. These bees are morphologically and behaviorally specialized in collecting oils as a reward from specialized floral glandular structures present in oil-producer plants. Oil-producer plants and oil-collecting bees have a mutualistic relationship in which the latter potentially pollinate the formers while collecting oils from their flowers. The main objective of this work is to infer the species richness and the key areas for conservation, research, and sustainable use of oil-collecting bees of the tribes Centridini, Tapinotaspidini, and Tetrapediini in the Americas. We collected occurrence records for 528 species of oil-collecting bees and estimated the species richness for each tribe and genus. In total, we estimated 664 species across the three mentioned tribes. With that baseline information, we created models of the richness and rarity patterns of the entire group of species and each tribe as a criterion to highlight key areas, along with richness and rarity centers for the American oil-collecting bees. We identified several critical areas that can be prioritized for conservation and research projects, including territories in Panama, Costa Rica, the Central and Northern Andes, the Amazon basin, and the biogeographic provinces of Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, Pampean, and Chacoan. Here we provide crucial information on key diversity areas for oil-collecting bees across the Americas. This information can be used for the conservation, research, and sustainable use of this important group of insect pollinators.

We analysed the wild bee community sampled from 1921 to 2018 at a nature preserve in southern Michigan, USA, to study long-term community shifts in a protected area. During an intensive survey in 1972 and 1973, Francis C. Evans detected 135 bee species. In the most recent intensive surveys conducted in 2017 and 2018, we recorded 90 species. Only 58 species were recorded in both sampling periods, indicating a significant shift in the bee community. We found that the bee community diversity, species richness and evenness were all lower in recent samples. Additionally, 64% of the more common species exhibited a more than 30% decline in relative abundance. Neural network analysis of species traits revealed that extirpation from the reserve was most likely for oligolectic ground-nesting bees and kleptoparasitic bees, whereas polylectic cavity-nesting bees were more likely to persist. Having longer phenological ranges also increased the chance of persistence in polylectic species. Further analysis suggests a climate response as bees in the contemporary sampling period had a more southerly overall distribution compared to the historic community. Results exhibit the utility of both long-term data and machine learning in disentangling complex indicators of bee population trajectories.

Sarcophagid experts have made several efforts to associate biodiversity data and comprehend where each species occurs, but comprehensive faunal inventories remain scarce. Our aim was to provide a list of distributional patterns and endemic species and allow assessment of the sampling effort conducted within Brazilian biomes. We produced a dataset of Brazilian sarcophagids and overlaid with a biome map, to investigate distributional patterns, endemism and to build species accumulation curves. Additionally, we calculated nonparametric asymptotic species richness estimators and extrapolation of species diversity (Hill numbers). Our dataset comprised 288 sarcophagid species, which 21 were identified as endemic. The biomes with the highest species richness were the Atlantic Rainforest and the Amazon Forest, and no biome exhibited a stabilized asymptotic curve. This is the first proposal of listing Sarcophagidae species by biomes and essential to understand the spatial distribution of this family in Brazil. We present maps and richness estimators that allow identifying gaps and guiding survey planning.

Biogeography has as a central theme, which is the study of geographic ranges of species that are determined by evolutionary history, abiotic factors, and biotic interactions. Understanding the influence of biotic interactions on geographic ranges is a topic that has been little explored, especially in a way that compares species that vary in intensity of interaction. Here, we assessed interaction intensity as a determinant of geographic range overlap between ant-following birds and army ants in Mexico and Central America. We hypothesized that the intensity of the interaction between army ants and ant-following birds, obligate or facultative, predicts the overlap of geographic ranges of interacting species, as well as the extension of geographic ranges. We generated species distribution models with MAXENT and estimated the percentage of overlap between two species of army ants and 10 species of ant-following birds. Contrary to our predictions, Bayesian regression models found no support for an estimated higher range overlap for obligate ant-following birds and army ants, or wider geographic ranges for facultative ant-following bird species. However, our results suggested trends for higher percentages of range overlap between obligate ant-following birds and army ants, and for geographic ranges of facultative ant-following birds extending to areas without the presence of army ants. Our research encourages further exploration of the biogeography of biotic interactions as part of a quantitative gradient of intensities and not as qualitative categories, integrating spatial and temporal variation in the intensity of interaction.

Species are often expected to shift their distributions either poleward or upslope to evade warming climates and colonise new suitable climatic niches. However, from 18‐years of fixed transect monitoring data on 88 species of butterfly in the midwestern United States, we show that butterflies are shifting their centroids in all directions, except towards regions that are warming the fastest (southeast).Butterflies shifted their centroids at a mean rate of 4.87 km year−1. The rate of centroid shift was significantly associated with local climate change velocity (temperature by precipitation interaction), but not with mean climate change velocity throughout the species' ranges.Species tended to shift their centroids at a faster rate towards regions that are warming at slower velocities but increasing in precipitation velocity.Surprisingly, species' thermal niche breadth (range of climates butterflies experience throughout their distribution) and wingspan (often used as metric for dispersal capability) were not correlated with the rate at which species shifted their ranges.We observed high phylogenetic signal in the direction species shifted their centroids. However, we found no phylogenetic signal in the rate species shifted their centroids, suggesting less conserved processes determine the rate of range shift than the direction species shift their ranges.This research shows important signatures of multidirectional range shifts (latitudinal and longitudinal) and uniquely shows that local climate change velocities are more important in driving range shifts than the mean climate change velocity throughout a species' entire range.

Biologists have long wondered how sexual ornamentation influences a species' risk of extinction. Because the evolution of condition‐dependent ornamentation can reduce intersexual conflict and accelerate the fixation of advantageous alleles, some theory predicts that ornamented taxa can be buffered against extinction in novel and/or stressful environments. Nevertheless, evidence from the wild remains limited. Here, we show that ornamented dragonflies are less vulnerable to extinction across multiple spatial scales. Population‐occupancy models across the Western United States reveal that ornamented species have become more common relative to non‐ornamented species over >100 years. Phylogenetic analyses indicate that ornamented species exhibit lower continent‐wide extinction risk than non‐ornamented species. Finally, spatial analyses of local dragonfly assemblages suggest that ornamented species possess advantages over non‐ornamented taxa at living in habitats that have been converted to farms and cities. Together, these findings suggest that ornamented taxa are buffered against contemporary extinction at local, regional, and continental scales.