A review of climate change effects on pollinators

Pollinator populations have been shown to be declining in recent years which could have large scale detrimental effects on various ecosystems. One of the primary threats to insect pollinators is a changing climate which is predicted to raise average temperatures, expand arid areas, and increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. The objectives of this work are to understand how these effects will impact pollinators to inform conservation efforts and to identify knowledge gaps to direct future research in the field. To better understand how climate change impacts pollinators, we performed a systematic review of the literature. We analyzed over 1900 publications that resulted from a Web of Science search using the terms “pollinator” and “climate change”. We recorded the types of climatic predictor variables (e.g., temperature, precipitation, plant phenology) and pollinator response variables (e.g., fitness, pollination service, population size, community composition). We also examined types of habitat, whether the study was experimental or observational, and the region of the study. Analysis is ongoing but we have so far found that 60% of distribution modeling studies predicted pollinator range reductions due to climate change. Additionally, 56% of studies measuring pollinator health showed that climate change had an overall negative effect. By synthesizing the state of the literature, we identify areas that need further investigation and quantify the effects of climate change on pollinators to inform conservation practices.