Strengthening links between agri-environment management and pollination services for cost-effective bee conservation

The contribution of animal pollination to UK crop production is valued at £630M, yet pollinators are still under significant pressure from unsustainable land use and management practices. Our recent work has demonstrated that there are significant deficits in pollination services across much of the UK due largely to habitat losses and homogenization.

Although there is policy and agricultural interest in restoring and conserving pollinators, we lack the necessary information to link different rates of pollinator visitation to economic benefits and quantify ecosystem service provision. This limits our ability to quantify the economic impacts of policies or farm management actions that attempt to mitigate pollinator losses or increase pollinator populations.

This project seeks to overcome this challenge by combining several quantitative analysis approaches to move from binary information about pollination benefits to an understanding of how small changes in pollinator visitation affect crop yield. Special attention will be paid to exploring how this relationship varies (e.g., between crop species, soil nutrient concentrations, unexplained variation) in order to capture variations in local farming conditions and uncertainty and to facilitate application of our results.

These relationships will then be used to test the cost and benefits of pollinator management practices, co-developed by case study farmers to fit their specific farm management strategies in line with current policy.