Claudio Gratton

Benjamin Iuliano, Claudio Gratton

Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America. 2026 May 11. pmid:42109227, pmc:PMC13158908, doi:10.1002/eap.70248

Understanding the capacity of mobile organisms such as insects to utilize resources across different patches in a landscape can reveal strategies for their conservation. Past research suggests that higher levels of non-crop habitat or landcover diversity in agricultural regions typically benefit generalist predators who can fortify their diets with prey from multiple adjacent habitats. For some taxa such as lady beetles (Coccinellidae), dietary diversity is associated with improved fitness, but…

Anina Knauer, Subodh Adhikari, Georg K S Andersson, Emilie Andrieu, András Báldi, Péter Batáry, Jordi Bosch, Sara L Bushmann, Domingo Cano, Romain Carrié, Bryan N Danforth, Francis A Drummond, Diane Esquerré, Daniel García, Claudio Gratton, Peter A Hambäck, Anne-Kathrin Happe, Veronica Hederström, Andrea Holzschuh, Philippe Jeanneret, Riina Kaasik, Temitope Kehinde, Jessica Knapp, Anikó Kovács-Hostyánszki, Claire Kremen, Ilona Leyer, Gisela Lüscher, Rachel Mallinger, Riho Marja, Carlos Martínez-Núñez, Fabian D Menalled, Leithen K M’Gonigle, Marcos Miñarro, Anne-Christine Mupepele, Charlie C Nicholson, Mark Otieno, Annie Ouin, Mia G Park, Maria-Helena Pereira-Peixoto, Antonio J Pérez, Simon G Potts, Annette Reineke, Pedro J Rey, Taylor H Ricketts, Justine Rivers-Moore, Stuart Roberts, Laura Roquer-Beni, Maj Rundlöf, Ulrika Samnegård, Michael J Samways, Janine M Schwarz, Oliver Schweiger, Henrik G Smith, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Louis Sutter, Giovanni Tamburini, Deniz Uzman, Eve Veromann, Aude Vialatte, Eneli Viik, Mark J F Brown, Alexandra-Maria Klein, Matthias Albrecht

Nature ecology & evolution. 2025 December 10. pmid:41372456, pmc:PMC12789018, doi:10.1038/s41559-025-02924-z

Pesticide use and habitat loss are major anthropogenic drivers of bee decline, raising global concerns about impaired crop pollination. However, the relative importance of these stressors and their combined impact on bee assemblages comprising species with different traits, such as body size or nesting strategy, remains unknown. Here we addressed these key knowledge gaps in a global quantitative synthesis analysing bee assemblage data from 681 crop fields across three continents. We found that…

Kris A G Wyckhuys, Kathryn Bushley, Claudio Gratton, Geoff M Gurr, Gabor Pozsgai, Teja Tscharntke, Thomas C Wanger, Yanhui Lu, Maged Elkahky

Trends in plant science. 2025 April 30. pmid:40307121, doi:10.1016/j.tplants.2025.03.012

Roughly 40% of global agri-food production is lost to pests during an era when productivity gains are essential to humanity. Restoring farmland biodiversity for conservation biological control offers potential to secure win-win outcomes for yield and the environment. However, achieving this is hindered by gaps in our understanding of agrobiodiversity, including a lack of data on the occurrence, identity, and interactions of farm-dwelling (plant, animal, microbial) biota. Limited…

Toby P N Tsang, A A Amado De Santis, Gabriela Armas-Quiñonez, John S Ascher, Eva Samanta Ávila-Gómez, András Báldi, Kimberly M Ballare, Mario V Balzan, Weronika Banaszak-Cibicka, Svenja Bänsch, Yves Basset, Adam J Bates, Jessica M Baumann, Mariana Beal-Neves, Ashley Bennett, Antonio Diego M Bezerra, Betina Blochtein, Riccardo Bommarco, Berry Brosi, Laura A Burkle, Luísa G Carvalheiro, Ignacio Castellanos, Marcela Cely-Santos, Hamutahl Cohen, Drissa Coulibaly, Saul A Cunningham, Sarah Cusser, Isabelle Dajoz, Deborah A Delaney, Ek Del-Val, Monika Egerer, Markus P Eichhorn, Eunice Enríquez, Martin H Entling, Natalia Escobedo-Kenefic, Pedro Maria Abreu Ferreira, Gordon Fitch, Jessica R K Forrest, Valérie Fournier, Robert Fowler, Breno M Freitas, Hannah R Gaines-Day, Benoît Geslin, Jaboury Ghazoul, Paul Glaum, Jose L Gonzalez-Andujar, Adrian González-Chaves, Heather Grab, Claudio Gratton, Solène Guenat, Catalina Gutiérrez-Chacón, Mark A Hall, Mick E Hanley, Annika Hass, Ernest Ireneusz Hennig, Martin Hermy, Juliana Hipólito, Andrea Holzschuh, Sebastian Hopfenmüller, Keng-Lou James Hung, Kristoffer Hylander, Jordi Izquierdo, Mary A Jamieson, Birgit Jauker, Steve Javorek, Shalene Jha, Björn K Klatt, David Kleijn, Alexandra-Maria Klein, Anikó Kovács-Hostyánszki, Jochen Krauss, Michael Kuhlmann, Patricia Landaverde-González, Tanya Latty, Misha Leong, Susannah B Lerman, Yunhui Liu, Ana Carolina Pereira Machado, Anson Main, Rachel Mallinger, Yael Mandelik, Bruno Ferreira Marques, Kevin Matteson, Frédéric McCune, Ling-Zeng Meng, Jean Paul Metzger, Paula María Montoya-Pfeiffer, Carolina Morales, Lora Morandin, Jane Morrison, Sonja Mudri-Stojnić, Pakorn Nalinrachatakan, Olivia Norfolk, Mark Otieno, Mia G Park, Stacy M Philpott, Gideon Pisanty, Montserrat Plascencia, Simon G Potts, Eileen F Power, Kit Prendergast, Robyn D Quistberg, Davi de Lacerda Ramos, André Rodrigo Rech, Victoria Reynolds, Miriam H Richards, Stuart P M Roberts, Malena Sabatino, Ulrika Samnegård, Hillary Sardiñas, Karina Sánchez-Echeverría, Fernanda Teixeira Saturni, Jeroen Scheper, Amber R Sciligo, C Sheena Sidhu, Brian J Spiesman, Tuanjit Sritongchuay, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Katharina Stein, Alyssa B Stewart, Jane C Stout, Hisatomo Taki, Pornpimon Tangtorwongsakul, Caragh G Threlfall, Carla Faleiro Tinoco, Teja Tscharntke, Katherine J Turo, Chatura Vaidya, Rémy Vandame, Carlos H Vergara, Blandina F Viana, Eric Vides-Borrell, Natapot Warrit, Elisabeth Webb, Catrin Westphal, Jennifer B Wickens, Neal M Williams, Nicholas S G Williams, Caleb J Wilson, Panlong Wu, Elsa Youngsteadt, Yi Zou, Lauren C Ponisio, Timothy C Bonebrake

Global change biology. 2025 January 4. pmid:39754379, doi:10.1111/gcb.70006

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e., γ-diversity), either due to reduced β-diversity amplifying diversity loss or increased β-diversity dampening diversity loss. Additionally, studies often focus on taxonomic diversity, while other important biodiversity components,…

Brian J Spiesman, Claudio Gratton, Elena Gratton, Heather Hines

PloS one. 2024 May 28. pmid:38805521, pmc:PMC11132477, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0303383

One of the most challenging aspects of bee ecology and conservation is species-level identification, which is costly, time consuming, and requires taxonomic expertise. Recent advances in the application of deep learning and computer vision have shown promise for identifying large bumble bee (Bombus) species. However, most bees, such as sweat bees in the genus Lasioglossum, are much smaller and can be difficult, even for trained taxonomists, to identify. For this reason, the great majority of…

Jeremy Hemberger, Olivia M Bernauer, Hannah R Gaines-Day, Claudio Gratton

Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America. 2023 August 21. pmid:37602909, doi:10.1002/eap.2907

Agricultural practices and intensification during the past two centuries have dramatically altered the abundance and temporal continuity of floral resources that support pollinating insects such as bumble bees. Long-term trends among bumble bees within agricultural regions suggest that intensive agricultural conditions have created inhospitable conditions for some species, while other species have maintained their relative abundances despite landscape-level changes in flower availability. Bumble…

Amy K Wray, Claudio Gratton, Michelle A Jusino, Jing Jamie Wang, Jade M Kochanski, Jonathan M Palmer, Mark T Banik, Daniel L Lindner, M Zachariah Peery

Ecology and evolution. 2022 July 5. pmid:35784069, pmc:PMC9170538, doi:10.1002/ece3.8978

The extent to which persisting species may fill the functional role of extirpated or declining species has profound implications for the structure of biological communities and ecosystem functioning. In North America, arthropodivorous bats are threatened on a continent-wide scale by the spread of white-nose syndrome (WNS), a disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. We tested whether bat species that display lower mortality from this disease can partially fill the functional…

Michael Howe, Kenneth F Raffa, Brian H Aukema, Claudio Gratton, Allan L Carroll

Oecologia. 2022 February 28. pmid:35226183, doi:10.1007/s00442-022-05129-4

Irruptive forest insects such as bark beetles undergo intermittent outbreaks that cause landscape-scale tree mortality. Despite their enormous economic and ecological impacts, we still have only limited understanding of the dynamics by which populations transition from normally stable endemic to irruptive densities. We investigated density-dependent changes in mountain pine beetle reliance on stressed hosts, host selection, spatial configuration of attacks, and the interaction of host selection…

Michael Howe, Allan Carroll, Claudio Gratton, Kenneth F Raffa

Global change biology. 2021 August 24. pmid:34428326, doi:10.1111/gcb.15861

Warming temperatures are allowing native insect herbivores to expand into regions that previously exceeded their thermal tolerance, encounter new host species, and pose significant threats to native communities. However, the dynamics of these expansions remain poorly understood, particularly in the extent to which outbreaks remain reliant on emigration from historical hosts or are driven by local reproduction within novel hosts in the expanded range. We tested these non-mutually exclusive…

Jeremy Hemberger, Michael S Crossley, Claudio Gratton

Ecology letters. 2021 June 18. pmid:34143928, doi:10.1111/ele.13786

Agricultural intensification is a key suspect among putative drivers of recent insect declines, but an explicit link between historical change in agricultural land cover and insect occurrence is lacking. Determining whether agriculture impacts beneficial insects (e.g. pollinators), is crucial to enhancing agricultural sustainability. Here, we combine large spatiotemporal sets of historical bumble bee and agricultural records to show that increasing cropland extent and decreasing crop richness…

Brian J Spiesman, Claudio Gratton, Richard G Hatfield, William H Hsu, Sarina Jepsen, Brian McCornack, Krushi Patel, Guanghui Wang

Scientific reports. 2021 April 8. pmid:33828196, pmc:PMC8027374, doi:10.1038/s41598-021-87210-1

Pollinators are undergoing a global decline. Although vital to pollinator conservation and ecological research, species-level identification is expensive, time consuming, and requires specialized taxonomic training. However, deep learning and computer vision are providing ways to open this methodological bottleneck through automated identification from images. Focusing on bumble bees, we compare four convolutional neural network classification models to evaluate prediction speed, accuracy, and…

Amy K Wray, M Zachariah Peery, Michelle A Jusino, Jade M Kochanski, Mark T Banik, Jonathan M Palmer, Daniel L Lindner, Claudio Gratton

Molecular ecology. 2020 December 10. pmid:33301628, doi:10.1111/mec.15769

Although most predators are generalists, the majority of studies on the association between prey availability and prey consumption have focused on specialist predators. To investigate the role of highly generalist predators in a complex food web, we measured the relationships between prey consumption and prey availability in two common arthropodivorous bats. Specifically, we used high-throughput amplicon sequencing coupled with a known mock community to characterize seasonal changes in little…

Matteo Dainese, Emily A Martin, Marcelo A Aizen, Matthias Albrecht, Ignasi Bartomeus, Riccardo Bommarco, Luisa G Carvalheiro, Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Vesna Gagic, Lucas A Garibaldi, Jaboury Ghazoul, Heather Grab, Mattias Jonsson, Daniel S Karp, Christina M Kennedy, David Kleijn, Claire Kremen, Douglas A Landis, Deborah K Letourneau, Lorenzo Marini, Katja Poveda, Romina Rader, Henrik G Smith, Teja Tscharntke, Georg K S Andersson, Isabelle Badenhausser, Svenja Baensch, Antonio Diego M Bezerra, Felix J J A Bianchi, Virginie Boreux, Vincent Bretagnolle, Berta Caballero-Lopez, Pablo Cavigliasso, Aleksandar Ćetković, Natacha P Chacoff, Alice Classen, Sarah Cusser, Felipe D da Silva E Silva, G Arjen de Groot, Jan H Dudenhöffer, Johan Ekroos, Thijs Fijen, Pierre Franck, Breno M Freitas, Michael P D Garratt, Claudio Gratton, Juliana Hipólito, Andrea Holzschuh, Lauren Hunt, Aaron L Iverson, Shalene Jha, Tamar Keasar, Tania N Kim, Miriam Kishinevsky, Björn K Klatt, Alexandra-Maria Klein, Kristin M Krewenka, Smitha Krishnan, Ashley E Larsen, Claire Lavigne, Heidi Liere, Bea Maas, Rachel E Mallinger, Eliana Martinez Pachon, Alejandra Martínez-Salinas, Timothy D Meehan, Matthew G E Mitchell, Gonzalo A R Molina, Maike Nesper, Lovisa Nilsson, Megan E O’Rourke, Marcell K Peters, Milan Plećaš, Simon G Potts, Davi de L Ramos, Jay A Rosenheim, Maj Rundlöf, Adrien Rusch, Agustín Sáez, Jeroen Scheper, Matthias Schleuning, Julia M Schmack, Amber R Sciligo, Colleen Seymour, Dara A Stanley, Rebecca Stewart, Jane C Stout, Louis Sutter, Mayura B Takada, Hisatomo Taki, Giovanni Tamburini, Matthias Tschumi, Blandina F Viana, Catrin Westphal, Bryony K Willcox, Stephen D Wratten, Akira Yoshioka, Carlos Zaragoza-Trello, Wei Zhang, Yi Zou, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter

Science advances. 2019 October 31. pmid:31663019, pmc:PMC6795509, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax0121

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance of species richness, abundance, and dominance for pollination; biological pest control; and final yields in the context of ongoing land-use change….

Tania Kim, Savannah Bartel, Claudio Gratton

Ecology and evolution. 2019 September 20. pmid:31534696, pmc:PMC6745673, doi:10.1002/ece3.5523

Disturbances have long been recognized as important forces for structuring natural communities but their effects on trophic structure are not well understood, particularly in terrestrial systems. This is in part because quantifying trophic linkages is a challenge, especially for small organisms with cryptic feeding behaviors such as insects, and often relies on conducting labor-intensive feeding trials or extensive observations in the field. In this study, we used stable isotopes of carbon and…

Sainath Suryanarayanan, Daniel Lee Kleinman, Claudio Gratton, Amy Toth, Christelle Guedot, Russell Groves, John Piechowski, Brad Moore, Deborah Hagedorn, Dayton Kauth, Heather Swan, Mary Celley

Bioscience. 2018 December 8. pmid:30524133, pmc:PMC6278639, doi:10.1093/biosci/biy118

We develop a transdisciplinary deliberative model that moves beyond traditional scientific collaborations to include nonscientists in designing complexity-oriented research. We use the case of declining honey bee health as an exemplar of complex real-world problems requiring cross-disciplinary intervention. Honey bees are important pollinators of the fruits and vegetables we eat. In recent years, these insects have been dying at alarming rates. To prompt the reorientation of research toward the…