Sandy grasslands are important habitats for a number of threatened species, including wild bees, butterflies and beetles. Many of these species are declining as a consequence of for instance changed land-use with overgrowth of open sandy habitats as a result. To restore these important habitats for the benefit of e.g. solitary wild bees a governmental restoration project was carried out between 2020 and 2022 in these types of habitats. This summer a project at the University will evaluate the effects of the restoration program on solitary wild bees and their resources.
This thesis work is a great opportunity to be a part of the project group to answer questions about these rare wild bees.
For example:
- Which plant species do rare solitary wild bees use for pollen resources in their natural environment?
- Is there differences between the pollen collected between the areas with intervention and the controls?
- Do the wild bees prefer certain plant species as pollen resources? This can be done as we also perform surveys of flower resources simultaneously
There is also opportunity to plan for fieldwork with other participants in the project, as well as formulate other research question connected to the restoration of the grasslands and population effects.
If the research question regards pollen, the project group has a pollen lab which can identify pollen automatically with machine learning techniques.
Are you interested to perform a thesis work with this project you are welcome to write to:
Georg Andersson, georg.andersson@biol.lu.se
Ola Olsson, ola.olsson@biol.lu.se