Suchergebnisse

Wild bee populations – important pollinators of many plants – are threatened with extinction due to reduced food resources, destruction of
nesting sites and habitat fragmentation.

The aim of this study is to determine the species diversity of wild bees in the parks of Kyiv. During the 2012-2017 spring-summer seasons a comprehensive study of the species composition and diversity of wild bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) was investigated. 115 wild bee species of 6 families and 34 genera have been found. Only 39 species among them were found in all parks and the common species are noted: Colletes cunicularius, Hylaeus communis, Andrena flavipes, Evylaeus calceatus, E. malachurus, E. politus, Anthophora plumipes, Bombus lucorum, B. terrestris, B. lapidarius, B. pascuorum. The proportions of species within each ecological group stay constant, except for the small decrease in oligolectic species. In all parks the ground-nesting bees are dominated. Bees that build nests in a different substrate (tree cavities, hollow plant stems, empties, holes, walls of buildings, and like) make up only 20 %. In general, on the territories of urban parks we have registered wild bees on the plants of more than 100 species from the families Asteraceaе, Fabaceaе, Lamiaceae, Rosaceaе. It should be noted, that ornamental flowering vegetation plays a significant role in wild bees nutrition in the city conditions. In some city parks we have found three species of wild bees that included in the Red Book of Ukraine: Bombus argillaceus, Xylocopa valga and Andrena chrysopus.

The results of our study show that city parks are important for the conservation of wild bee populations, and the main conditions for this are the availability of flower sources and nesting sites.

The coastal eco-region of Kenya, Africa, is known for high levels of endemism on the African continent for plant and other taxa like birds, butterflies, and amphibians. The continued management and survival of these forests has been through different means such as government protection, traditional management of sacred forests, and local community engagement. Forest-adjacent communities have always relied heavily on forest resources for their livelihood. Currently, these forests are facing an increasing pressure from local economic development and surrounding urban expansion. Therefore a pressing challenge is to conciliate sustainable forest management with community needs. In some forests, butterfly farming was introduced as a management strategy to address this challenge. Experience so far shows that butterfly farming has been a viable approach for reshaping the community's relation to the forest, supporting conservation, improving livelihoods , and creating social enterprises. Overall, knowledge about status and trends of biodiversity is the baseline for enhancing conservation strategies. Plant diversity is the crucial factor for the ecosystem productivity and services of the coastal forests. This affects the ecological processes and ecosystem services they provide. There is therefore need for an update on the plant species checklists, their values on the forest and uses by forest reliant communities. Here we investigated the knowledge status on plant species diversity, distribution, and plant conservation status across coastal forests in Kenya. The occurrences of more than 3,000 species were recorded in 16 patches of coastal forests. Due to lack of data and variation in sampling methods, data of species richness are affected by major biases across the national forest parks of Arabuko Sokoke Forest, Shimba Hills and sacred sites. Thus, there is an urgent need to assess and improve the knowledge base of Kenyan coastal forests biodiversity through standardized field sampling. Such information is needed to better guide forest management, conservation policy and human interventions at both local and regional scales. Key words: Plant species diversity, coastal forests, forest management, local community engagement, Kenya ; peerReviewed

National parks and bioreserves are key conservation tools used to protect species and their habitats within the confines of fixed political boundaries. This inflexibility may be their "Achilles' heel" as conservation tools in the face of emerging global-scale environmental problems such as climate change. Global climate change, brought about by rising levels of greenhouse gases, threatens to alter the geographic distribution of many habitats and their component species. With these changes comes great uncertainty about the future ability of parks and protected areas to meet their conservation mandates. We report here on an analysis aimed at assessing the extent of mammalian species turnover that may be experienced in eight selected U.S. national parks if climate change causes mammalian species within the continental U.S. to relocate to new geographic locations. Due to species losses of up to 20% and drastic influxes of new species, national parks are not likely to meet their mandate of protecting current biodiversity within park boundaries. This approach represents a conservative prognosis. As species assemblages change, new interactions between species may lead to less predictable indirect effects of climate change, increasing the toll beyond that found in this study.