The Forgotten Pollinators

By Stephen L. Buchmann, G. Nabhan. 2012

353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Consider this: Without interaction between animals and flowering plants, the seeds and fruits that make up nearly eighty percent of the human diet would not exist.In "The Forgotten Pollinators," Stephen L. Buchmann, one of the world's leading authorities on bees and pollination, and Gary Paul Nabhan, award-winning writer and renowned crop ecologist, explore the vital but little-appreciated relationship between plants and the animals they depend on for reproduction -- bees, beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, bats, and countless other animals, some widely recognized and other almost unknown.Scenes from around the globe -- examining island flora and fauna on the Galapagos, counting bees in the Panamanian rain forest, witnessing an ancient honey-hunting ritual in Malaysia -- bring to life the hidden relationships between plants and animals, and demonstrate the ways in which human society affects and is affected by those relationships. Buchmann and Nabhan combine vignettes from the field with expository discussions of ecology, botany, and crop science to present a lively and fascinating account of the ecological and cultural context of plant-pollinator relationships.More than any other natural process, plant-pollinator relationships offer vivid examples of the connections between endangered species and threatened habitats. The authors explain how human-induced changes in pollinator populations -- caused by overuse of chemical pesticides, unbridled development, and conversion of natural areas into monocultural cropland-can have a ripple effect on disparate species, ultimately leading to a "cascade of linked extinctions."

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30a0a2ce3157ce5fe8b980b84dba826778641612

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. R. Winfree
2. M. Aizen
3. Dave Goulson
4. D. P. Vázquez
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6. N. Williams
7. C. Kremen
8. B. Blaauw

Citations in the corpus

• Butterfly Species Richness Patterns in Canada: Energy, Heterogeneity, and the Potential Consequences of Climate Change (2001, background): “The general public seems to have the impression that European honey bees (the introduced species, Apis mellifera) and bumble bees (Bombus spp.) are virtually the only pollinators (Buchmann and Nabhan 1996).”
• IDEAS A ND PERSPECTIVES Pollinators as mediators of top-down effects on plants (2003, background): “At least 67% of flowering plants depend on insect pollinators (Tepedino 1979), and perhaps 90% use animals (Buchmann & Nabhan 1996).”
• Using Pollination Deficits to Infer Pollinator Declines: Can Theory Guide Us? (2001, background): “Long ago, Rachel Carson pointed out that silent springs and fruitless falls go hand in hand (Buchmann and Nabhan 1996: 23).”
• Habitat Fragmentation and Native Bees: a Premature Verdict? (2001, background): “Published: April 5, 2001 INTRODUCTION A number of conservation-minded reviews have concluded that habitat fragmentation is broadly deleterious to invertebrate pollinators (Rathcke and Jules 1993, Buchmann and Nabhan 1996, Matheson et al. 1996, Murcia 1996, Renner 1996).”