Pollination services in changing landscapes: New tools for understanding the distribution of native bees in Costa Rica

Ecosystem services are critical for food security but can be disrupted by certain land uses within complex agricultural landscapes.  Pollination by native bees is an important ecosystem service, and is vulnerable to agricultural intensification and management practices, especially in the tropics. This project will compare the abundance and diversity of native bees in pasture, teak plantations, shade coffee farms, young secondary forest, and mature secondary forest in Hojancha, Costa Rica. The bee communities will be assessed using standard trapping and sweep net surveys.  With these data as a baseline, the project will examine how remote sensing methods can be used to characterize this variation to provide information applicable to managing pollinators at large scales. It has been demonstrated that variables from high-resolution remote sensing images can be effective in predicting certain insect populations. The land uses in Hojancha are readily distinguished by remote sensing and are expected to harbor distinct pollinator communities. Thus, this system provides an ideal opportunity to test the feasibility of using remote sensing data to assess pollinators at the landscape scale. The information gathered will be part of an interdisciplinary study that evaluates the provisioning of multiple ecosystem services by different land uses. Results from one field season of pollinator assessments and validation of remote sensed inferences will be presented and discussed.