Drastic shifts in the Belgian bumblebee community over the last century

Bumblebees are undergoing strong declines in Europe caused by habitat loss and fragmentation, agricultural intensification, and climate change. Long-term records are necessary to estimate population trends precisely and to propose appropriate mitigation strategies. Based on an original database of 173,788 specimens from museum collections, scientific monitoring, and opportunistic citizen data from 1810 to 2016, we compared changes in species richness and area of occupancy of Belgian bumblebee species through three time-periods (1910–1930, 1970–1989, and 1990–2016). We also assessed if the obse... Mehr ...