The Role of Prairie Restorations in the Conservation of Native Bee Communities Across a Gradient of Agricultural Land Use

Abstract

Ecological restoration is an important tool in the conservation of tallgrass prairies and native bees in intensively farmed regions. However, these same agricultural landscapes may alter the types of bees that can colonize and persist in prairie restorations due to fragmentation and biotic homogenization. My dissertation explores how bee community diversity, heterogeneity, and composition in prairie restorations change in response to an increasing gradient of agricultural land cover in Western Minnesota. In an effort to better understand if agricultural land cover impacts the ability of prairies restorations to conserve at-risk bee species, I utilize this gradient to compare native bee communities in prairie restorations to those in prairie remnants, and attempt to compare differences in rare and declining species. Bee communities in prairie restorations were surprisingly diverse and heterogeneous despite high levels of agricultural land cover. While there were differences in bee community composition between restored and remnant prairies, these differences were related to dramatically different floral communities. Overall, my results show that bee communities in prairie restorations are surprisingly resilient to high proportions of surrounding agricultural land, and suggest that highly agricultural landscapes should not deter restoration and conservation practitioners from restoring degraded land in these regions.