Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators

By Richard J. Gill, K. Baldock, Mark J. F. Brown, J. Cresswell, L. Dicks, M. Fountain, M. Garratt, Leonie A Gough, M. Heard, John M. Holland and 17 more. 2016

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Insect pollination constitutes an ecosystem service of global importance, providing significant economic and aesthetic benefits as well as cultural value to human society, alongside vital ecological processes in terrestrial ecosystems. It is therefore important to understand how insect pollinator populations and communities respond to rapidly changing environments if we are to maintain healthy and effective pollinator services. This paper considers the importance of conserving pollinator diversity to maintain a suite of functional traits to provide a diverse set of pollinator services. We explore how we can better understand and mitigate the factors that threaten insect pollinator richness, placing our discussion within the context of populations in predominantly agricultural landscapes in addition to urban environments. We highlight a selection of important evidence gaps, with a number of complementary research steps that can be taken to better understand: i) the stability of pollinator communities in different landscapes in order to provide diverse pollinator services; ii) how we can study the drivers of population change to mitigate the effects and support stable sources of pollinator services; and, iii) how we can manage habitats in complex landscapes to support insect pollinators and provide sustainable pollinator services for the future. We advocate a collaborative effort to gain higher quality abundance data to understand the stability of pollinator populations and predict future trends. In addition, for effective mitigation strategies to be adopted, researchers need to conduct rigorous field-testing of outcomes under different landscape settings, acknowledge the needs of end-users when developing research proposals and consider effective methods of knowledge transfer to ensure effective uptake of actions.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/90c95f65d70a0d2a5cd05b736aa02d449e9c677e

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Citations in the corpus

Landscape impacts on pollinator communities in temperate systems: evidence and knowledge gaps (2017, unknown): “A number of national and international initiatives have been developed to improve understanding of the risks posed to pollinators (Gill et al. 2016) such as the ﬁrst thematic assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which is focused on pollinators,…”
The potential of different semi-natural habitats to sustain pollinators and natural enemies in European agricultural landscapes (2019, background): “The generation of more refined information on vegetation traits and floral resource availability will help to maximise the returns from SNH and reduce the amount of land taken out of production to deliver such services (Gill et al., 2016).”
Safeguarding pollinators and their values to human well-being (2016, unknown): “…in pollinator diversity and ranges are relatively well-documented in parts of Europe and North America, a lack of wild pol-linator data (species identity, distribution, occurrence and abundance) for Latin America, Africa and Asia limit any general conclusions on regional status and trends 43 .”
Massively Introduced Managed Species and Their Consequences for Plant–Pollinator Interactions (2017, unknown): “MIMS (see Gill et al., 2016).”
Pollination reservoirs for wild bee habitat enhancement in cropping systems: a review (2017, background): “Authors of reviews and policy papers of broader scope have come to similar conclusions, and make additional policy and research recommendations (see Dicks et al. 2013; Garibaldi et al. 2014; Gill et al. 2016).”