Stability of pollination services decreases with isolation from natural areas despite honey bee visits.

By L. Garibaldi, I. Steffan‐Dewenter, C. Kremen, J. Morales, R. Bommarco, S. Cunningham, L. Carvalheiro, N. Chacoff, Jan‐Hendrik Dudenhöffer, Sarah S. Greenleaf and 13 more. Ecology Letters, 2011

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Sustainable agricultural landscapes by definition provide high magnitude and stability of ecosystem services, biodiversity and crop productivity. However, few studies have considered landscape effects on the stability of ecosystem services. We tested whether isolation from florally diverse natural and semi-natural areas reduces the spatial and temporal stability of flower-visitor richness and pollination services in crop fields. We synthesised data from 29 studies with contrasting biomes, crop species and pollinator communities. Stability of flower-visitor richness, visitation rate (all insects except honey bees) and fruit set all decreased with distance from natural areas. At 1 km from adjacent natural areas, spatial stability decreased by 25, 16 and 9% for richness, visitation and fruit set, respectively, while temporal stability decreased by 39% for richness and 13% for visitation. Mean richness, visitation and fruit set also decreased with isolation, by 34, 27 and 16% at 1 km respectively. In contrast, honey bee visitation did not change with isolation and represented > 25% of crop visits in 21 studies. Therefore, wild pollinators are relevant for crop productivity and stability even when honey bees are abundant. Policies to preserve and restore natural areas in agricultural landscapes should enhance levels and reliability of pollination services.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0deb87f942011ac5a7472a29eabad0f56632b008

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Citations in the corpus

Linking Land Cover Data and Crop Yields for Mapping and Assessment of Pollination Services in Europe (2013, background): “The model is in essence built on the hypothesis that the visitation rate of crops by pollinators is a function of the distance to natural areas [23,41].”
Non-bee insects are important contributors to global crop pollination (2015, neutral): “Wild pollinators other than honey bees recently have been recognized for their role in increasing and stabilizing crop-pollination services (11, 12).”
Landscape impacts on pollinator communities in temperate systems: evidence and knowledge gaps (2017, positive): “For example, Garibaldi et al. (2011) conducted a global synthesis of studies from six continents examining landscape scale eﬀects on ﬂower-visi-tor richness and pollination services in crop ﬁelds from contrasting biomes.”
Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security. (2018, background): “Pollinator dependent plants typically display higher production instability than non-pollination dependent crops (59), which suggests stability benefits for agricultural systems due to decoupling from nature.”
Frontiers inEcology and the Environment From research to action : enhancing crop yield through wild pollinators (2014, background): “A possible solution to this “vicious cycle” is to increase pollinator abundance through single-species management, most commonly European honey bees (Apis mellifera), which are not greatly affected by isolation from natural areas (Winfree et al. 2009; Garibaldi et al. 2011b).”
Pollinator conservation - The difference between managing for pollination services and preserving pollinator diversity (2015, neutral): “All crop pollinators (dominant or not) depend on diverse plant species often provided by (semi-) natural habitats, and few species are found in abundance far away from natural habitat [19,20].”
Spillover of functionally important organisms between managed and natural habitats (2012, background): “tural landscapes has been documented on six continents across a wide range of habitat and managed landscapes (Liow et al., 2001; Garibaldi et al., 2011).”
Economic and ecological implications of geographic bias in pollinator ecology in the light of pollinator declines (2014, background): “…ve on how pollinators or pollination services are responding to disturbances (Aguilar et al. 2006, Ricketts et al. 2008, Morales and Traveset 2009, Garibaldi et al. 2011, Ferreira et al. 2013.) and three focused specifi cally on bees (Winfree et al. 2009, Williams et al. 2010, Kennedy et al.…”
Building height matters: nesting activity of bees and wasps on vegetated roofs (2016, background): “Horizontal landscape isolation from florally diverse habitats has been correlated with reduced observations of wild bees on flowers (Jauker et al. 2009; Garibaldi et al. 2011).”
From research to action: Enhancing crop yield through wild pollinators (2014, background): “A possible solution to this “vicious cycle” is to increase pollinator abundance through single-species management, most commonly European honey bees (Apis mellifera), which are not greatly affected by isolation from natural areas (Winfree et al. 2009; Garibaldi et al. 2011b).”
Synthesis, part of a Special Feature on A Social-Ecological Analysis of Diversified Farming Systems: Benefits, Costs, Obstacles, and Enabling Policy Frameworks Ecosystem Services in Biologically Diversified versus Conventional Farming Systems: Benefits, Externalities, and Trade-Offs (2012, background): “…Belfrage 2004, Lin 2011). http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss4/art40/ Increasingly in the Global South and largely in the north, diversified farming systems have been replaced with highly simplified industrial monocultures (Benton et al. 2003, Tscharntke et al. 2005, DeFries et al. 2010).”
Ecosystem services by birds and bees to coffee in a changing climate: A review of coffee berry borer control and pollination (2019, background): “Several studies have shown that proximity to natural or semi-natural habitats increases bee diversity and pollination services (e.g., Steffan-Dewenter and Tscharntke, 1999; Klein et al., 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Ricketts, 2004; Priess et al., 2007; Ricketts et al., 2008; Klein, 2009; Garibaldi et al., 2”