Pollinator organisms supports around 90% of wild plant species and 70% of food crops. The global economic value of pollination amounts to 153,000 million euros per year. Currently, pollinators are in a crisis of decline in abundance, occurrence and biodiversity. Despite of pollinator importance, there is a great knowledge gap about pollinators in mega diverse regions such as Mexico. Basic questions remain unanswered. For instance: what species occur in a country? What are their potential distributions? What are the patterns of biodiversity of pollinators? To explore these questions we built Mahalanobis ecological niche models (ENM) to obtain potential distribution of species. We obtained occurrences of pollinator species from database repositories (GBIF). We followed best practices for modeling niches and species distributions: geographical and environmental records were checked for consistency, and filtered to reduce spatial autocorrelation. Using NicheToolbox (in R) the most appropriate environmental variables were selected. Spatial resolution of 5 km was used, and finally, we used range-diversity plots created from presence-absence matrices for analysis of Mexican pollinator richness. We performed all analysis in R language.
Results/Conclusions
Our analyses suggested that Mexico has at least 2,404 species of pollinators, including bats (16), hummingbirds (58), sphingids (202), and Apoidea (bees and bumblebees) with 2,128 species. For all species, 2,226,438 occurrences were obtained from GBIF, with 86,070 unique presences remaining after cleaning data. Ecological niche models of pollinator bats shows that the most restricted potential distribution species was Lichonycteris obscura. Richness analysis of bat pollinators shows a greater number of species per unit area towards the south of the country. However, co-diversity and co-distribution of all other pollinator organisms will shape richness patterns. Our results will provide clearer picture of the current state and the vulnerability of pollinators in Mexico, and will be useful for the management of conservation policies, which are urgent in the face of growing anthropogenic pressures.