Rare and declining bee species are key to consistent pollination of wildflowers and crops across large spatial scales

Biodiversity promotes ecosystem function in experiments, but it remains uncertain how biodiversity loss affects function in larger-scale natural ecosystems, where rare and declining species which are likely to be lost and function needs to be maintained across space and time. Here we explore the importance of rare and declining bee species to the pollination of three wildflowers and three crops using large-scale (72 sites across 5,000 km2), multi-year datasets. Half (82/164) bee species were rare or declining, but these species provided ~15% of overall pollination. To determine the number of species important to ecosystem function, we used two methods of 'scaling up', both of which have previously been used for biodiversity-function analysis. First, we summed bee species' contributions to pollination across space and time and then found the minimum set of species needed to provide a threshold level of function across all sites; according to this method, effectively no rare and declining bee species were important to pollination. Second, we account for the "insurance value" of biodiversity by finding the minimum set of bee species needed to simultaneously provide a threshold level of function at each site in each year. The second method leads to the conclusion that 25 rare and eight declining bee species (36% and 53% of all rare and declining bee species, respectively) are important. Our findings provide some of the strongest evidence yet for the importance of rare and declining species, thereby providing a more direct link between real-world biodiversity loss and ecosystem function.