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Predicting the distribution range of a recently described, habitat specialist bee

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Abstract

The Wallacean shortfall—lack of adequate knowledge of a species’ distribution in the geographic space—hinders practical actions towards species conservation, and such severe data deficit is ubiquitous when dealing with insect species. Considering the effects of human activities on Earth, especially in the last 50 years, proper delimitation of species distributions is of utmost importance for their conservation, but this is challenging when occurrence data for a species are limited. Here, we present suitable areas of occurrence for a recently-described specialist bee in the Southeastern United States (Colletes ultravalidus Hall and Ascher), modeled with presence-only methods that are robust to small number of occurrence points. Incorporation of new citizen science data points derived from images submitted online for identification enhanced the species distribution model which, in turn, validated the new sites as suitable for the species. Consideration of absence points, i.e. sites where the species was not recorded despite intensive surveys for Colletes and other specialist bees, resulted in more precise predications that can inform future searches for this bee. This study exemplifies how citizen-science projects may contribute to improving understanding of species biogeographic ranges and thus to overcoming the Wallacean shortfall. The need for critical evaluation prior to and after modeling of the occurrences obtained by non-specialists are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the citizens that actively uploaded information on C. ultravalidus to the BugGuide website, as well as all website developers, editors and other contributors to this internet-based initiative. The authors also thank Anya Roopa Gajanur and two anonymous reviewers for suggesting improvements to a previous version of this manuscript. DPS was supported by a productivity grant from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq—Proc. Number: 304494/2019-4).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ciências Biológicas, Instituto Federal Goiano, Urutaí, GO, 75790-000, Brazil

    Daniel P. Silva

  2. Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611- 0620, USA

    H. Glenn Hall

  3. St. Francisville, LA, 70775-7405, USA

    H. Glenn Hall

  4. Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore, 117543, Singapore

    John S. Ascher

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Silva, D.P., Hall, H.G. & Ascher, J.S. Predicting the distribution range of a recently described, habitat specialist bee. J Insect Conserv 24, 671–680 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-020-00241-3

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