Widespread losses of pollinating insects in Britain

By G. Powney, C. Carvell, M. Edwards, R. Morris, Helen E. Roy, B. Woodcock, Nick J B Isaac. Nature Communications, 2019

610 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pollination is a critical ecosystem service underpinning the productivity of agricultural systems across the world. Wild insect populations provide a substantial contribution to the productivity of many crops and seed set of wild flowers. However, large-scale evidence on species-specific trends among wild pollinators are lacking. Here we show substantial inter-specific variation in pollinator trends, based on occupancy models for 353 wild bee and hoverfly species in Great Britain between 1980 and 2013. Furthermore, we estimate a net loss of over 2.7 million occupied 1 km2 grid cells across all species. Declines in pollinator evenness suggest that losses were concentrated in rare species. In addition, losses linked to specific habitats were identified, with a 55% decline among species associated with uplands. This contrasts with dominant crop pollinators, which increased by 12%, potentially in response agri-environment measures. The general declines highlight a fundamental deterioration in both wider biodiversity and non-crop pollination services. Pollinator loss is a concern but data on their status is lacking. Here Powney et al. use occupancy modelling to estimate the degree of loss in wild bee and hoverfly species across Great Britain, and report a 55% decline in upland species and a 12% increase in dominant crop pollinators.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9b102d85ad0f590b12d1971fde8b7fbe4e1c43a

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Citations in the corpus

Monitoring insect pollinators and flower visitation: The effectiveness and feasibility of different survey methods (2019, background): “In Great Britain (GB), records collated by the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society and the Hoverfly Recording Scheme have allowed unparalleled insights into the status and distributional changes of bees and hoverflies in GB (Carvalheiro et al., 2013; Powney et al., 2019).”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “Several authors have modelled opportunistically collected occurrence data to extend the time periods over which insect trends can be inferred (Powney et al., 2019; van Strien et al., 2019), to expand coverage of taxa and functional groups (Outhwaite et al.”
Towards a U.S. national program for monitoring native bees (2020, neutral): “including for bees and other pollinators (Biesmeijer et al., 2006; Potts et al., 2010; Powney et al., 2019).”
Further evidence for a global decline of the entomofauna (2020, background): “Also, upland species retracted on average 55%, whereas species that inhabited southern parts of the country decreased occupancy by 25%, suggesting a climate warming effect (Powney et al. 2019).”
Pollinator monitoring more than pays for itself (2020, background): “…that the occupancy of bee and hover-fly species has declined by an average of 25% across Britain since 1980, particularly among specialist species (Powney et al., 2019), resulting in homogeneous pollinator communities (Carvalheiro et al., 2013) and disrupting plant–pollinator networks (Redhead et…”
Managed honey bees as a radar for wild bee decline? (2020, background): “…over time; evidence from species-specific, quantitative, and year-to-year assessments of changes in population sizes is much rarer, though they are becoming the focus of more attention as the quality of both datasets and computational techniques improves (Ogilvie et al. 2017; Powney et al. 2019).”