Landscape effects on crop pollination services: are there general patterns?

By Taylor H. Ricketts, James Regetz, I. Steffan‐Dewenter, S. Cunningham, C. Kremen, A. Bogdanski, B. Gemmill-Herren, Sarah S. Greenleaf, Alexandra-Maria Klein, M. Mayfield and 4 more. Ecology Letters, 2008

1,339 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pollination by bees and other animals increases the size, quality, or stability of harvests for 70% of leading global crops. Because native species pollinate many of these crops effectively, conserving habitats for wild pollinators within agricultural landscapes can help maintain pollination services. Using hierarchical Bayesian techniques, we synthesize the results of 23 studies - representing 16 crops on five continents - to estimate the general relationship between pollination services and distance from natural or semi-natural habitats. We find strong exponential declines in both pollinator richness and native visitation rate. Visitation rate declines more steeply, dropping to half of its maximum at 0.6 km from natural habitat, compared to 1.5 km for richness. Evidence of general decline in fruit and seed set - variables that directly affect yields - is less clear. Visitation rate drops more steeply in tropical compared with temperate regions, and slightly more steeply for social compared with solitary bees. Tropical crops pollinated primarily by social bees may therefore be most susceptible to pollination failure from habitat loss. Quantifying these general relationships can help predict consequences of land use change on pollinator communities and crop productivity, and can inform landscape conservation efforts that balance the needs of native species and people.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b203831d2390667614e6e7eaab191b860974dc4

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Citations in the corpus

What do we know about the effects of landscape changes on plant–pollinator interaction networks? (2013, neutral): “…et al., 2009; Frankie et al., 2009; Bommarco et al., 2011), pollinators community composition (Carre et al., 2009), pollinators ﬂoral visits behavior (Ricketts et al., 2008) and may inﬂuence plant reproductive success (Priess et al., 2007; Kim et al., 2006 Additionally, conventional agricultural…”
Massively Introduced Managed Species and Their Consequences for Plant–Pollinator Interactions (2017, background): “…feeding resources for pollinators are mainly provided by wild flowering plants in seminatural remnants (e.g. grasslands, field margins, hedgerows; Ricketts et al., 2008; Rollin et al., 2013; Steffan-Dewenter and Tscharntke, 2001) and MFC for a short duration (Herrmann et al., 2007; Westphal et…”
Natural land cover drives pollinator abundance and richness, leading to reductions in pollen limitation in cotton agroecosystems (2016, background): “For example, increasing isolation from natural habitats has been found to be associated with a decline in crop pollination (reviewed in Ricketts et al., 2008).”
Organic dairy farming: impacts on insect–flower interaction networks and pollination (2011, neutral): “Most pollination network studies have not addressed the links between observed insect assemblages and pollination (Ricketts et al. 2008).”
Evolutionary changes in plant reproductive traits following habitat fragmentation and their consequences for population fitness (2012, background): “With ongoing habitat alteration, climate change and agricultural chemical usage, changes in pollinator assemblages are even expected to increase further in the near future (Ricketts et al. 2008; Winfree et al. 2009; Potts et al. 2010).”
The quantification and valuation of ecosystem services (2011, background): “…services cite as a representative example the work of bees in pollinating almond, particularly in California, which produces 80% of the world's crop (Kremen and Ostfeld, 2005; see also Fisher et al., 2009; Kremen et al., 2008; Kontogianni et al., 2010; Ricketts et al., 2008, among others).”
Landscape moderation of biodiversity patterns and processes ‐ eight hypotheses (2012, background): “In complex landscapes, agroecosystems are characterized by a high level of immigration of organisms from remnant natural or semi-natural habitat (Tscharntke, Rand & Bianchi, 2005b; Bianchi et al., 2006; Ricketts et al., 2008), which can outweigh effects of any local agri-environment practices (Kreme”
The global stock of domesticated honey bees is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. (2009, background): “Much current evidence demonstrates that pollination by unmanaged bees contributes substantially to the production of many crops, particularly in areas of low to moderate agricultural intensification, which provides a mosaic of crops and adjacent remnants of natural and seminatural habitats that offe”
Spillover of functionally important organisms between managed and natural habitats (2012, background): “…semi-natural land to more heavily managed agricultural land is well documented in recent reviews (Aizen and Feinsinger, 1994b; Klein et al., 2007; Ricketts et al., 2008; Garibaldi et al., 2011), we are still missing an important piece of the puzzle; there are remarkably few studies on the…”
Beyond nectar provision: the other resource requirements of parasitoid biological control agents (2016, background): “For example, semi-natural habitat cover and landscape complexity are strongly linked to insect pollination (Ricketts et al., 2008; Holzschuh et al., 2012), and several beneficial insects and birds require shelter, overwintering habitat, and alternative food sources (Landis et al., 2000; Martin et…”
Economic and ecological implications of geographic bias in pollinator ecology in the light of pollinator declines (2014, background): “…Ollerton et al. 2011, Romero et al. 2011), fi 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…”
How well do we understand landscape effects on pollinators and pollination services (2012, background): “…with different degrees of connectivity or even barriers that impede animal movement through the landscape (Kreyer et al. 2004; Ekroos et al. 2008; Ricketts et al. 2008), which can strongly modify pollinator flows and consequently the success of crosspollination (Gathmann & Tscharntke 2002;…”