Abstract
Despite the importance of insect pollination to produce marketable fruits, insect pollination management is limited by insufficient knowledge about key crop pollinator species. This lack of knowledge is due in part to (1) the extensive labour involved in collecting direct observations of pollen transport, (2) the variability of insect assemblages over space and time and (3) the possibility that pollinators may need access to wild plants as well as crop floral resources. We address these problems using strawberry in the United Kingdom as a case study. First, we compare two proxies for estimating pollinator importance: flower visits and pollen transport. Pollen-transport data might provide a closer approximation of pollination service, but visitation data are less time-consuming to collect. Second, we identify insect parameters that are associated with high importance as pollinators, estimated using each of the proxies above. Third, we estimated insects' use of wild plants as well as the strawberry crop. Overall, pollinator importances estimated based on easier-to-collect visitation data were strongly correlated with importances estimated based on pollen loads. Both frameworks suggest that bees (Apis and Bombus) and hoverflies (Eristalis) are likely to be key pollinators of strawberries, although visitation data underestimate the importance of bees. Moving beyond species identities, abundant, relatively specialised insects with long active periods are likely to provide more pollination services. Most insects visiting strawberry plants also carried pollen from wild plants, suggesting that pollinators need diverse floral resources. Identifying essential pollinators or pollinator parameters based on visitation data will reach the same general conclusions as those using pollen transport data, at least in monoculture crop systems. Managers may be able to enhance pollination service by preserving habitats surrounding crop fields to complement pollinators' diets and provide habitats for diverse life stages of wild pollinators.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e12253 |
| Journal | Ecological Solutions and Evidence |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 9 Jul 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We would like to thank the owners of the field sites: Richard, Philip and Adrian Winter at Team Green Growers, and Jan Butterley at Nynehead Fruit. We are grateful to Mark Pavett, John Deeming, Brian Levey and Mike Wilson at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff for insect identifications. We would like to thank the members of the Spatial Foodweb Ecology Group for their useful comments on this manuscript. This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) (NE/T013621/1), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Academy of Finland (AKA) (grant 334787), coordinated through the Belmont Forum Climate, Environment and Health Collaborative Research Action (proposal 1550). Further support was provided by the Bristol Centre for Agricultural Innovation. T.R. was funded by the European Research Council Synergy Grant 856506 (LIFEPLAN), by the Academy of Finland (grant 322266), and by a Career Support grant from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. A.C. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Academy of Finland (1332999).
Funding Information:
We would like to thank the owners of the field sites: Richard, Philip and Adrian Winter at Team Green Growers, and Jan Butterley at Nynehead Fruit. We are grateful to Mark Pavett, John Deeming, Brian Levey and Mike Wilson at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff for insect identifications. We would like to thank the members of the Spatial Foodweb Ecology Group for their useful comments on this manuscript. This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) (NE/T013621/1), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Academy of Finland (AKA) (grant 334787), coordinated through the Belmont Forum Climate, Environment and Health Collaborative Research Action (proposal 1550). Further support was provided by the Bristol Centre for Agricultural Innovation. T.R. was funded by the European Research Council Synergy Grant 856506 (LIFEPLAN), by the Academy of Finland (grant 322266), and by a Career Support grant from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. A.C. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Academy of Finland (1332999).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Ecological Solutions and Evidence published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.
Keywords
- crop pollination
- insect
- key species
- monitoring
- parameters
- pollen
- strawberry
- visitation