Publication Date
2022
Journal or Book Title
Conservation Science and Practice
Abstract
Forest management is often practiced to enhance conditions for wildlife, including native bees. Evaluations of the effects of forest management on bees have shown that abundance and diversity are higher in newly created early-successional conditions. To date, studies have restricted sampling to the forest understory; however, recent research finds that bee abundance is as high or higher in forest canopies than in understories, suggesting that previous observations of substantially greater bee abundance and diversity in recently managed areas could be an artifact of incomplete sampling of the vertical gradient within forests. To examine the potential implications of sampling biases associated with the failure of previous studies to include canopy samples in comparisons of managed and unmanaged forests, we sampled bees within a recently harvested forest as well as the understory and canopy of adjacent unmanaged forest. Bee abundance and diversity were an order of magnitude higher in managed areas compared to the unmanaged forest, even when understory and canopy samples were combined. These results suggest that not sampling the canopy is inconsequential with respect to the broadly reported conclusion that managed areas support more abundant and diverse bee communities than surrounding forest cover.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.12690
Volume
4
Issue
6
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
License
UMass Amherst Open Access Policy
Recommended Citation
Milam, Joan; Cunningham-Minnick, Michael; Roberts, Henry Patrick; Buelow, Christopher; and King, David I., "The contribution of canopy samples to assessments of forestry effects on native bees" (2022). Conservation Science and Practice. 464.
https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.12690