Aim Wild bees still face striking shortfalls in knowledge of biodiversity in key regions of the world. This includes Europe, where despite a long tradition of data gathering, the continental scale distribution patterns of wild bees have not been systematically analysed to date. This study aims to characterise large‐scale biodiversity patterns to: (i) understand spatial–temporal heterogeneity in large‐scale databases, (ii) loca...

Pollinators are threatened worldwide and strategies and measures to support their conservation are proliferating. Among them, the approach “Farming with Alternative Pollinators” (FAP) aims to support pollinators by seeding strips of pollinator-attracting cultivated plants surrounding the crops, and simultaneously providing income to the farmer. In this study we assessed whether this approach supports pollinator diversity in ag...

Climate plays a key role in shaping population trends and determining the geographic distribution of species because of limits in species’ thermal tolerance. An evaluation of species tolerance to temperature change can therefore help predict their potential spatial shifts and population trends triggered by ongoing global warming. We assessed inter‐ and intraspecific variations in heat resistance in relation to body mass, local...

Multisource approaches in taxonomy gather different lines of evidence in order to draw strongly supported taxonomic conclusions and constitute the basis of integrative taxonomy. In the case of overlooked taxa with disjunct distributions for which sampling is more challenging, integrative approaches help to propose stable hypotheses at the species and subspecies levels. Here, based on genetic and semio‐chemical traits, we perfo...

Aim Projections of biodiversity scenarios often rely solely on climate change to inform species distribution shifts in the future. Land use projections are rarely used due to their unavailability and, when available, are often at coarse spatial and thematic resolutions, making them unsuitable to capture fine scale habitat suitability. This study aims to (a) show how coupled land use change (LUC) models of high thematic resolut...

Global change affects species by modifying their abundance, spatial distribution, and activity period. The challenge is now to identify the respective drivers of those responses and to understand how those responses combine to affect species assemblages and ecosystem functioning. Here we correlate changes in occupancy and mean flight date of 205 wild bee species in Belgium with temporal changes in temperature trend and interan...

The latest progress of the taxonomy is the use of integrative approach for species delimitation based on a multisource dataset. However, the taxonomic decision that should be made when convergence between the different lines of evidence is not observed remains debated. Here, we investigate the consequences of the application of an ‘integration by cumulation’ approach on the taxonomic statuses within the Bombus lapidarius compl...

Species can respond differently when facing environmental changes, such as by shifting their geographical ranges or through plastic or adaptive modifications to new environmental conditions. Phenotypic modifications related to environmental factors have been mainly explored along latitudinal gradients, but they are relatively understudied through time despite their importance for key ecological interactions. Here we hypothesiz...

Bumblebees in Europe have been in steady decline since the 1900s. This decline is expected to continue with climate change as the main driver. However, at the local scale, land use and land cover ( LULC ) change strongly affects the occurrence of bumblebees. At present, LULC change is rarely included in models of future distributions of species. This study's objective is to compare the roles of dynamic LULC change and climate...

Aim Studying the changes in species ranges during the last glaciation event is an important step towards the understanding of the observed patterns of intra‐specific genetic variability. We focused on bumblebees, an interesting biological model to address these questions because cold‐adapted species are likely to have experienced different geographical range histories during the last glacial period compared to more commonly st...

Several bee species are experiencing significant population declines. As bees exclusively rely on pollen for development and survival, such declines could be partly related to changes in their host plant abundance and quality. Here, we investigate whether generalist bumblebee species, with stable population trends over the past years, adapted their diets in response to changes in the distribution and chemical quality of their...

Delimitation of closely related species is often hindered by the lack of discrete diagnostic morphological characters. This is exemplified in bumblebees (genus Bombus ). There have been many attempts to clarify bumblebee taxonomy by using alternative features to discrete morphological characters such as wing shape, DNA , or eco‐chemical traits. Nevertheless each approach has its own limitations. Recent studies have used a mult...

Concern about biodiversity loss has led to increased public investment in conservation. Whereas there is a widespread perception that such initiatives have been unsuccessful, there are few quantitative tests of this perception. Here, we evaluate whether rates of biodiversity change have altered in recent decades in three European countries (Great Britain, Netherlands and Belgium) for plants and flower visiting insects. We comp...

Phylogenetic relationships among and within the major groups of bees (Apoidea Apiformes) were recently reconsidered using extensive molecular and morphological datasets. The next step in the study of bee evolution will consist in estimating the antiquity of the nodes within the inferred topologies. We describe here the third oldest bee fossil, Paleohabropoda oudardi gen. n. sp. N. (Apidae, Apinae, Anthophorini) from the Paleoc...