Multiscale effects of habitat amount and landscape heterogeneity on solitary cavity-nesting bees

Abstract

This is the work plan for the application of the Ph.D student Paula Carolina Montagnana, Ecology and Evolution of Bees and Wasps Laboratory, USP Ribeirão Preto, FAPESP scholarship holder2015/06728-1. This internship will be developed at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF), Barcelona, Spain, supervised by Professor Jordi Bosch. The motivation for this internship is to advance the research of this PhD project, and investigate host-parasite networks analysis responses to landscape structure. More specifically, I will investigate how forest amount and spatial heterogeneity at multiple scales affects host-parasite interaction networks in tropical fragmented landscapes. I also intend to detect diversity loss thresholds on solitary bee and wasp communities. Data collected on 30 landscapes sampled between September to March 2015-2016 and September to March 2016-2017 in the Cantareira-Mantiqueira Corridor, São Paulo state, Brazil will be used to build the host-parasite networks. These networks will be assessed throughout ecological specialization, weighted nestedness and modularity metrics. The relationship between ecological network metrics and landscape structure will be analyzed using univariate and bivariate linear or non-linear regression models. The best models to explain the patterns will be assessed using a multiple hypothesis comparison approach. Understanding how landscape structure can affect host parasite interactions will produce valuable knowledge about the effects of anthropic changes not only about species loss but also the loss of interactions, which tend to be lost first. (AU)