MODELLING THE POTENTIAL DISTRIBUTION OF HONEY BEES IN TÜRKİYE UNDER CMIP6 CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS USING SPECIES DISTRIBUTION MODELLING AND ETHICAL EVALUATION OF TECHNOLOGICAL RESPONSES

Date

2026-9-4

Author

Zurnacı, Nisanur

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Bees are essential for food security through pollination, but their decline has driven technological responses such as robotic bees, which remain experimental. This thesis evaluates replacing living bees with robotic bees, a substitution that does not currently exist, to question technological fixes from an ethical perspective organized around economic, ecological, and moral axes. The first part uses MaxEnt species distribution modeling in R to project habitat suitability for managed honey bees in Türkiye, drawing on beekeeping records from TÜİK together with CMIP6 climate data downscaled to ~9 km, under two scenarios up to 2100. In both scenarios, the suitable area shrinks: from ~19% today to ~17% under SSP2-4.5 and 9% under SSP5-8.5, receding from the southern and western plains towards higher altitudes. Because records are limited, cannot distinguish subspecies, and do not capture the movement of migratory colonies, these figures are read as indicative rather than predictive. The second part, an ethical assessment, has two aspects. First, the baseline data are insufficient; results are therefore fragile, as is any solution based on them. Second, drawing on the distinction between ecosystem health (a system's continued functioning) and ecosystem integrity (its relationships and composition), the thesis argues that technological substitutes may sustain health; however, they disrupt integrity. Between anthropocentric and ecocentric ethics, the thesis proposes an intermediate position between Norton's weak anthropocentrism and Callicott's moral non-anthropocentrism. Natural and migratory beekeeping are therefore encouraged as long as living pollination remains sustainable, while technological fixes such as robotic bee technology remain a last resort.

Subject Keywords

Climate Change, Honey bees, Species Distribution Modelling, Environmental Ethics, Artificial Pollination, İklim Değişikliği, Bal Arıları, Tür Dağılım Modellemesi, Çevre Etiği, Yapay Tozlaşma

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120723

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis