Rebecca Tonietto Graduate student |
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Research interests I am interested in the effects of habitat fragmentation caused by urbanization or agricultural development on native bee communities.
Are native bees present on green roofs in Chicago? My thesis work at Northwestern is an investigation of the native bee communities at 18 sites in and around Chicago (Figure 1). My research assistants and I performed pollinator observations at two representative native prairie plants between June and October, 2008. Our sites included: 6 Green Roofs 6 Chicago City Parks 6 Restored Prairies
We also collected data on the surrounding bloom density and diversity, as well as the amount of green space surrounding each site using ArcGIS.
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Project Summary
The native tallgrass prairie that covered most of Illinois is one of the most threatened ecosystems worldwide; less than 1% of it remains. Much of this native bee habitat has been lost to agriculture and development, although portions of it have been transformed into other forms of green space, such as fields, lawns, and parks.
In human dominated environments, other potential wild bee habitats need to be investigated to determine if native bees are able to utilize anthropogenically-altered green space. This has already been proven successful in agricultural zones of the northeast (Winfree et al., 2008), and in New York City gardens (Matteson et al., 2008). This study will expand upon investigations of urban landscape to include rooftop gardens, and green roofs in and around the Chicago region, and compare urban bee communities to those at restored prairies.
This study will include pollinator observations at two bee-pollinated flowering plants, with drastically different floral morphologies: Penstemon spp, and a member of Asteraceae. This is an expansion of a typical bee survey, as it also provides observational data of pollinator services at focal forbs present at all sites. Active net sampling and passive collecting with pan traps will be used to collect voucher specimens for pollinators, and to compare the actual to the entire potential pollinating communities within each site.
All bees will be identified to species level, and voucher specimens will be housed at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Duplicate specimens will be shared with the UDSA Bee Lab, the Illinois Natural History Survey, and The American Museum of Natural History.
All findings will be compared to the wealth of historic native bee surveys completed near the turn of the century by Charles Roberston between1884 and 1916, and Jay Frederick Wesley Pearson during the 1920’s, to determine the state of Illinois wild bees. Results will be presented in the context of implications for urban conservation, and habitat preservation for the wild, native bees of Illinois.
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