Delivery of crop pollination services is an insufficient argument for wild pollinator conservation

By D. Kleijn, R. Winfree, Ignasi Bartomeus, L. Carvalheiro, Mickaël Henry, R. Isaacs, Alexandra-Maria Klein, C. Kremen, L. M’Gonigle, Romina Rader and 48 more. Nature Communications, 2015

924 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is compelling evidence that more diverse ecosystems deliver greater benefits to people, and these ecosystem services have become a key argument for biodiversity conservation. However, it is unclear how much biodiversity is needed to deliver ecosystem services in a cost-effective way. Here we show that, while the contribution of wild bees to crop production is significant, service delivery is restricted to a limited subset of all known bee species. Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops. Dominant crop pollinators persist under agricultural expansion and many are easily enhanced by simple conservation measures, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management strategies to promote threatened bees. Conserving the biological diversity of bees therefore requires more than just ecosystem-service-based arguments. One argument for conserving biological diversity is that it delivers beneficial ecosystem services. However, Kleijn et al.show that the economic benefits of crop pollination are delivered by only a small subset of relatively common species, arguing that threatened species should be considered separately.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81291b3cf3ec118c1f0c689bb30a73d74713d789

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Pollinators and Global Food Security: the Need for Holistic Global Stewardship (2016, background): “In the context of pollinator conservation, the Convention’s strategy has been criticised for solely building on human benefits from biodiversity as rationale for conservation (Senapathi et al. 2015; Kleijn et al. 2015).”
Monitoring insect pollinators and flower visitation: The effectiveness and feasibility of different survey methods (2019, background): “Characterising plant–pollinator interactions or identifying which species of insect are delivering pollination service to crops and wildflowers require transects (or other observational methods) as pan traps do not reflect this (Kleijn et al., 2015; Gibbs et al., 2017).”
Semi‐natural habitats mitigate the effects of temperature rise on wild bees (2017, background): “Although pollination of many crops is dominated by few common species (Kleijn et al. 2015) and their abundance (Winfree et al.”
Landscape impacts on pollinator communities in temperate systems: evidence and knowledge gaps (2017, neutral): “Pollinators provide a crucial ecosystem service by improving quality or stabilising yields of approximately 75% of crop-plant species globally (Kleijn et al. 2015).”
Massively Introduced Managed Species and Their Consequences for Plant–Pollinator Interactions (2017, background): “…which should be tailored to the identity of pollinators and their ecological requirements (Blaauw and Isaacs, 2014; Blackmore and Goulson, 2014; Garratt et al., 2014; Tschumi et al., 2016) without systematically overlooking the need to conserve all species of pollinators (Kleijn et al., 2015).”
Pollination efficiency and foraging behaviour of honey bees and non‐Apis bees to sweet cherry (2019, background): “Despite the significant contribution of wild pollinator abundance and pollinator diversity for pollinator dependent crops worldwide (Garibaldi et al., 2013; Kleijn et al., 2015; Rader et al., 2016), only the abundance of a few pollinator species is commonly managed for greater yield.”
Do sown flower strips boost wild pollinator abundance and pollination services in a spring-flowering crop? A case study from UK cider apple orchards (2017, result): “2013; Kleijn et al. 2015).”
Non-bee insects are important contributors to global crop pollination (2015, positive): “our results are consistent with other studies that have found that visitation frequency drives the overall function provided by a species, because the variance across species in their flower visitation is much larger than the variance in per-visit function (28, 58).”