Louisiana Native Bee Lab
Research
Biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships in natural systems
Ecosystem services (e.g. carbon storage, pollination) are derived from Earth’s biodiversity and are essential for human life. We want to know how these services will be affected by human activities causing declines in richness and abundance. Our perception of how biodiversity drives ecosystem services relies on highly-controlled experiments, and it is unclear if those results can be extended to the real world.
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Resolving this knowledge gap is difficult, because real-world data are messy. Abundance is highly variable, community composition changes non-randomly, and richness is confounded with both. A promising approach for dealing with real-world data is the “ecological” Price equation. I have worked in this area since 2017, when I published a version of the ecological Price equation for the temporal variance of ecosystem services (Ecology 2017) and was awarded an NSF grant to explore this research area with existing data. The NSF grant ran from 2019-2021 and was in collaboration with my postdoc advisor, Dr. Rachael Winfree. As part of the NSF grant, I published a synthetic analysis (GEB 2020) and hired a postdoc (Dr. Tina Harrison) who developed new analytical methods (AmNat 2022). We collaborated with Dr. Michael Roswell to ask similar questions, focusing on how using different Hill numbers to measure biodiversity affects the strength of biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships, again using real-world data (PTRSB 2023).
Plant-pollinator interactions and pollination efficiency
Pollination ecology has often viewed plant-pollinator interactions in terms of abundance – how many flowers, and how many pollinators. Less work has examined whether variation in pollinator behavior (nectar vs. pollen foraging, order or plant visits, etc.) or traits (body size, tongue length, hairiness, etc.) affects the actual benefit that plants receive per pollinator visit. Using these methods we have estimated the pollen deposition rates of rare and declining bee species (Ecology 2023).
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With PhD student Andrew Buderi, we carried out a meta-analysis concluding that there rare broad patterns of trait matching between plants and bees that determine pollinator efficiency. This work, in collaboration with Maureen Page, Charlie Nicholson, and Neal Williams, is in review at Functional Ecology.
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With PhD student Blaine Pilch, we are exploring how predator density affect pollinator behavior and efficiency. His first paper (in review at Ecology) found that bees become increasingly tolerant of predation risk as resources are exhausted in safer habitat patches. Ongoing work suggests that predator density reduces pollinator efficiency for most (but not all) bee morphogroups and plant species. Look for this work in 2024-2025!
Plant and pollinator ecology of threatened Louisiana habitats
The gulf coastal prairie in Louisiana (known locally as the Cajun prairie) once occupied 2.5 million acres, but only a few hundred acres remain. We want to understand which pollinators are key for the reproduction of prairie plants, and which plants are important for the nutritional needs of pollinators. Building this knowledge could help guide and improve ongoing restoration efforts in the prairie. This work has been funded by the Louisiana Department of Education..
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Similarly, Louisiana hosts longleaf pine savannas, which now cover only 1-5% of their original 90 million acres in the Southeastern USA. The lab recently received a State Wildlife Grant to research understory restoration strategies in longleaf pine savannas, with a focus on how pollinators are affected. This work has started and will continue through 2025.
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Finally, MS student Anna Espinoza carried out the first survey of pollinators on Louisiana barrier islands, another habitat of great conservation interest. She focused on which pollinators commonly visited dune-building plant species, and likely documented a new species of Lasioglossum (to be finalized).