Economic gain, stability of pollination and bee diversity decrease from southern to northern Europe
By S. Leonhardt, Nicola Gallai, L. Garibaldi, M. Kuhlmann, Alexandra-Maria Klein. 2013
130 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Bees are in decline potentially leading to reduced pollination and hence production of insect-pollinated crops in many countries. It is however still unclear whether the consequences of pollinator shortages differ among countries with different environmental and societal conditions. Here, we calculated economic gains attributed to insect (particularly bee) pollination (EVIP) as well as their contribution to the total value of crop production (vulnerability), and analyzed their temporal trends and inter-annual variability from 1991 to 2009 for each country of the European Union (EU). To understand which factors drive country-specific differences in pollinator dependency and stability of insect-dependent crop yields, we further asked whether EVIP, vulnerability and stability of yields were influenced by a country's climate, the number of wild bee species and/or managed honeybee hives per country, and (agricultural) gross domestic product (GDP). Across Europe, crop pollination by insects accounted for 14.6 [±3.3] billion EUR annually (EVIP), which equaled 12 (±0.8)% of the total economic value of annual crop production. Gains strongly varied among countries. Both EVIP and vulnerability increased (and the inter-annual variation of vulnerability decreased) significantly from the colder northern to the warmer Mediterranean EU countries, in parallel with increases in the number of wild bee species. Across years, economic importance of pollination increased in all but three EU countries. Apples were the most important insect-pollinated crop in the EU, accounting for 16% of the EU's total EVIP. Our results show that whereas dependency on insect pollination increased from the colder north to the warmer south, variation in economic gain from insect pollination decreased, indicating that Mediterranean countries had more stable yields of pollinator-dependent crops across years and thus more reliable gains from pollination services.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa6c7a9d7dd8d86543544c30acd431b8f59b9c3c
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Citations in the corpus
- Relationships between wild bees, hoverflies and pollination success in apple orchards with different landscape contexts (2016, background): “Apple is one of the most important insect pollinated crops in the European Union, accounting for 16% of the European Union’s total economic gains attributed to insect (particularly bee) pollination (Leonhardt et al., 2013).”
- Diversity and abundance of solitary and primitively eusocial bees in an urban centre: a case study from Northampton (England) (2015, background): “Wild bees (Hymenoptera) are one of the major pollinators of angiosperms (Moldenke 1976; Simpson 1977; Klein et al. 2007) but their diversity and abundance is generally reduced in many regions (Frankie et al. 2009; Grixti et al. 2009; Potts et al. 2010; Leonhardt et al. 2013; Ollerton et al. 2014).”