Emma Falkeid Eriksen - Genetic risk and connectivity in neotropical pollinators

Orchid bees are key pollinators in the Neotropics. Occurrence points from GBIF and photo from Düster et al. 2018. Peru is shaded on the map.

Home institution and supervisors
Bastiaan Star, UiO, Norway
Markus A. K. Sydenham, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Norway

Host institution and supervisors
Mabel Alvarado, UNMSM, Peru

Project description
Insects are key ecosystem service providers, and loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to have cascading effects on natural ecosystems and human welfare. Bees are the most important group of animal pollinators and are in urgent need of conservation. To mitigate the decline, we have to assess the diversity at risk of collapse and how it is spatially distributed in the landscape. In her Ph.D. project, Emma is uniting functional ecology and genomics to understand and predict the distribution and genomic structure of Scandinavian wild bees to create population connectivity models and locate multi-species diversity hotspots and barriers of dispersal, to identify management priority areas and conservation targets. With her background in genomics she will work with local ecologists in Peru to better understand the genetic risk and connectivity in neotropical pollinators.

Unlike the Palearctic, where the glacial retreat and following recolonization still influence the observed genetic patterns of local species, the Neotropical realm is a study system with a long evolutionary history. In the face of anthropogenic landscape-level changes, tropical and temperate species may respond differently when it comes to maintaining population connectivity, suggesting the need for geographically specific conservation actions, which genomic data are vital to inform. This project will use population genomic methods to provide estimates of gene flow, demographic history, inbreeding, and effective population size in a key neotropical wild bee pollinator, the Orchid bee (Apidae, Euglossini).