Abstract

Abstract: Stingless bees are key pollinators of both wild plants and crops in tropical Asia and are exploited for honey production and pollination services. Despite their importance, little is known about their habitat preferences in anthropogenic landscapes. We aimed to identify critical environmental variables influencing the distribution of six genera of Asian stingless bees as well as the overall stingless bee community, to identify suitable and core anthropogenic habitats, and to identify priority habitats for conservation in Thailand. We adopted a range of modeling approaches to estimate habitat suitability based on key environmental variables such as landscape features, climate, topography, and vegetation. Our results indicate that the habitat suitability for stingless bee community is strongly influenced by landscape factors including distance to nearest forest, proportions of paddy fields, forest, field crops, and villages. Among the six genera studied, Tetragonula showed the largest areas of suitable anthropogenic habitats. This may be because Tetragonula is the most diverse and widespread of all Old World stingless bees. For the overall stingless bee community, suitable anthropogenic habitats (defined as areas with a probability of occurrence > 0.195, with this threshold determined by maximizing the sum of sensitivity and specificity), and core anthropogenic habitats (defined as areas with a probability of occurrence > 0.9), accounted for 19.06% and 0.09% of the country’s area, respectively. Approximately 2% of the country’s land are considered high-priority habitats that are suitable for at least 4 genera of stingless bees (defined as areas with a probability of occurrences > 0.5) across human-modified landscapes. However, since this study could not distinguish between wild and managed populations, the findings likely reflect both the ability of stingless bees to persist in human-modified landscapes and the potential influence of beekeeping activities. Implications for insect conservation: Our findings can guide decision makers to support actions toward protecting and sustainably managing this important pollinator group, Asian stingless bees, particularly in response to ongoing environmental changes.