Abstract
Wild and managed bees are key pollinators, providing ecosystem services to a large fraction of the world’s flowering plants, including ∼85% of all cultivated crops. Recent reports of wild bee decline and its potential consequences are thus worrisome. However, evidence is mostly based on local or regional studies; global status of bee decline has not been assessed yet. To fill this gap, we analyzed publicly available worldwide occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility spanning more than a century of specimen collection. We found that after the 1980’s the number of collected bee species declines steeply, and approximately 25% fewer species were reported between 2006 and 2015 relative to the number of species counted before the 1990’s. These trends are alarming and encourage swift action to avoid further decline of these key pollinators.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Data from years 2016-2019 have been excluded to avoid artifacts caused by delayed data inclusion. The center of the ten-year bins used for several analyses have been shifted by 5 years, and the bins have been renamed from "decades" to "idecades" (i.e., inter-decadal period). Code has been rewritten to better comply with tidy data standards, and all analyses have been re-run. Figures have been re-plotted. Country-specific analyses have been performed and plotted for countries with independent existing reports of decline in bee diversity.