Implications of Sea Level Rise for Bee Communities in Rural Eastern Virginia Coastal Habitats

ABSTRACT: In the coastal mid-Atlantic region of the USA, landscapes are a mosaic of upland habitats (woodland, grassland, old fields and farmland) and low-lying coastal salt marsh. Flooding and salinization of coastal areas due to sea-level rise result in the conversion of upland habitats to salt marsh, and change the relative proportion of habitat types surrounding coastal farmland. This has the potential to influence population sizes of organisms living in this area and could alter the ecosystem services, such as pollination, that these habitats provide. To examine the potential outcome of these habitat conversions, we used blue vane traps at 14 sites along the Eastern Shore of Virginia (USA) to compare the bee communities of salt marsh, old fields and agricultural fields. Although there was no difference among habitat types for total bee abundance per site, we found that the coastal marsh is depauperate in bee species relative to old fields and agricultural fields, and that the bee species using the marsh habitat tend to be specialists of plant families that are common in the marsh (Asteraceae and Malvaceae) but are relatively uncommon in local agriculture. Thus, the transition of upland areas to marsh not only has the potential to impact agricultural productivity directly through salt water intrusion, ultimately it may also reduce the species richness of native bees available to provide pollination services to coastal agriculture.