Climate Change Prompts Monitoring and Systematic Utilization of Honey Bee Diversity in Turkey

Abstract

Quantitative studies concerning the impact of climate change on pollinators are generally lacking. Relationship between honey bee diversity, present local adaptations and adaptive capacity of subspecies and ecotypes in the face of climate change is an urgent but rather poorly studied topic worldwide. Actually, such an effort lies at the crossroads of various fields of inquiry. Those include conservation of local honey bee diversity, breeding various local stocks for desirable traits, and enabling resilient ecosystem services. With the ever-increasing availability of genomic tools, now it is more probable than ever to simultaneously fill such gaps. Current knowledge and growing awareness on honey bee diversity in Turkey let us progress into a more systematic utilization of this resource through development of climate-conscious models. Here we provide a framework that takes genomic diversity into account for assessing and monitoring various aspects of species’ response to climate change which can potentially lead to drastic impacts.

Keywords

• Global change
• adaptive capacity
• Long-term monitoring
• whole genome sequencing
• natural selection

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