Anna Wurster (Universität Kassel)
Anna Wurster's Master thesis was awarded with the Prize for the Best Plant Science Master Thesis, which was carried out at Kassel University in the year 2025 with the title:
Pilot study on the resource use of wild bees on grassland areas of the Hessian State Domain Frankenhausen using a novel collection method and DNA metabarcoding
The pilot study shows that even small wild bee species can be successfully analyzed by means of a minimally invasive collection method and pollen metabarcoding and that these are useful for studies on biodiversity in agricultural landscapes.
Around half of all wild bee species in Germany are critically endangered or even extinct; there has been a sharp decline in wild bee diversity, particularly in agricultural ecosystems, with the specialization of many species in certain nesting and feeding sites making them particularly susceptible to changes in their environment. Understanding the diversity and food spectra of individual wild bee species in agroecosystems is essential to halt this decline. For this purpose, this master's thesis investigated the occurrence of wild bees and the respective resource utilization of individual bees on two grassland areas of the Hessian state domain Frankenhausen (Hesse/Germany), using a minimally invasive collection method, pollen metabarcoding and taking into account different inspection strategies and collection times. Over 100 different plant traces were detected and identified on a total of 40 different wild bee species and food webs were created for individual specimens. Differences were found both in the abundance of the animals and in their respective resource use in dependence on the chosen inspection strategy and time of day. The results of this pilot study clearly show that different collection strategies do have an influence on the obtained results and thus make it possible to make recommendations for optimized follow-up studies, which can be used to record wild bee diversity even more efficiently in the future.
___
Anna Wurster conducted this work at the institute for biology in the botany working group of Prof. Dr. Birgit Gemeinholzer.
