First large-scale study reveals important losses of managed honey bee and stingless bee colonies in Latin America.

Over the last quarter century, increasing honey bee colony losses motivated standardized large-scale surveys of managed honey bees (Apis mellifera), particularly in Europe and the United States. Here we present the first large-scale standardized survey of colony losses of managed honey bees and stingless bees across Latin America. Overall, 1736 beekeepers and 165 meliponiculturists participated in the 2-year survey (2016-2017 and 2017-2018). On average, 30.4% of honey bee colonies and 39.6% of stingless bee colonies were lost per year across the region. Summer losses were higher than winter losses in stingless bees (30.9% and 22.2%, respectively) but not in honey bees (18.8% and 20.6%, respectively). Colony loss increased with operation size during the summer in both honey bees and stingless bees and decreased with operation size during the winter in stingless bees. Furthermore, losses differed significantly between countries and across years for both beekeepers and meliponiculturists. Overall, winter losses of honey bee colonies in Latin America (20.6%) position this region between Europe (12.5%) and the United States (40.4%). These results highlight the magnitude of bee colony losses occurring in the region and suggest difficulties in maintaining overall colony health and economic survival for beekeepers and meliponiculturists.

Integrating public engagement to intensify pollination services through ecological restoration.

Globally, human activities impose threats to nature and the provision of ecosystem services, such as pollination. In this context, ecological restoration provides opportunities to create managed landscapes that maximize biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture, e.g., via provision of pollination services. Managing pollination services and restoration opportunities requires the engagement of distinct stakeholders embedded in diverse social institutions. Nevertheless, frameworks toward sustainable agriculture often overlook how stakeholders interact and access power in social arenas. We present a perspective integrating pollination services, ecological restoration, and public engagement for biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. We highlight the importance of a comprehensive assessment of pollination services, restoration opportunities identification, and a public engagement strategy anchored in institutional analysis of the social arenas involved in restoration efforts. Our perspective can therefore guide the implementation of practices from local to country scales to enhance biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture.

Functional Traits in Bees: the Role of Body Size and Hairs in the Pollination of a Passiflora Crop.

Pollination is a vitally important function in nature and becomes an ecosystem service because it influences the food and nutritional security for people. However, the contribution of different functional traits of insects for pollen transport of plants is still poorly known. We explore the relationship between pollinator insect functional traits and the transport of pollen of sweet granadilla (Passiflora ligularis Juss) in eight crops. We sampled flower-visiting insects of this crop and recorded 10 functional traits (five by direct measurements and five from the literature) that were related to the amount of pollen carried by each insect. Bees (Apidae) were not only the most abundant insects but also the ones that loaded the highest amounts of pollen. Within these, the most abundant species was the exotic common honeybee (Apis mellifera (Linnaeus)) making up almost half of the specimens collected; however, this bee carried less pollen grains than other native bees. Bombus hortulanus (Smith) was one of the large-bodied native bees that carried more sweet granadilla pollen, despite not being an abundant species in the community. Body size was the most important trait determining the transport of sweet granadilla pollen, while the traits related to body hairs were not significant for the body's pollen load. None of the functional traits evaluated was influenced by taxonomy at species-level. Our results suggest that large body sizes in bees are the most important traits in granadilla pollen transport, regardless of other changes in composition and structure of pollinating insect assemblages in the crop.

AgroEcoList 1.0: A checklist to improve reporting standards in ecological research in agriculture.

Many publications lack sufficient background information (e.g. location) to be interpreted, replicated, or reused for synthesis. This impedes scientific progress and the application of science to practice. Reporting guidelines (e.g. checklists) improve reporting standards. They have been widely taken up in the medical sciences, but not in ecological and agricultural research. Here, we use a community-centred approach to develop a reporting checklist (AgroEcoList 1.0) through surveys and workshops with 23 experts and the wider agroecological community. To put AgroEcoList in context, we also assessed the agroecological community's perception of reporting standards in agroecology. A total of 345 researchers, reviewers, and editors, responded to our survey. Although only 32% of respondents had prior knowledge of reporting guidelines, 76% of those that had said guidelines improved reporting standards. Overall, respondents agreed on the need of AgroEcolist 1.0; only 24% of respondents had used reporting guidelines before, but 78% indicated they would use AgroEcoList 1.0. We updated AgroecoList 1.0 based on respondents' feedback and user-testing. AgroecoList 1.0 consists of 42 variables in seven groups: experimental/sampling set-up, study site, soil, livestock management, crop and grassland management, outputs, and finances. It is presented here, and is also available on github (https://github.com/AgroecoList/Agroecolist). AgroEcoList 1.0 can serve as a guide for authors, reviewers, and editors to improve reporting standards in agricultural ecology. Our community-centred approach is a replicable method that could be adapted to develop reporting checklists in other fields. Reporting guidelines such as AgroEcoList can improve reporting standards and therefore the application of research to practice, and we recommend that they are adopted more widely in agriculture and ecology.

Bee and non-bee pollinator importance for local food security.

Pollinators are critical for food security; however, their contribution to the pollination of locally important crops is still unclear, especially for non-bee pollinators. We reviewed the diversity, conservation status, and role of bee and non-bee pollinators in 83 different crops described either as important for the global food market or of local importance. Bees are the most commonly recorded crop floral visitors. However, non-bee pollinators are frequently recorded visitors to crops of local importance. Non-bee pollinators in tropical ecosystems include nocturnal insects, bats, and birds. Importantly, nocturnal pollinators are neglected in current diurnal-oriented research and are experiencing declines. The integration of non-bee pollinators into scientific studies and conservation agenda is urgently required for more sustainable agriculture and safeguarding food security for both globally and locally important crops.

Pollinator Deficits, Food Consumption, and Consequences for Human Health: A Modeling Study.

BACKGROUND: Animal pollination supports agricultural production for many healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, that provide key nutrients and protect against noncommunicable disease. Today, most crops receive suboptimal pollination because of limited abundance and diversity of pollinating insects. Animal pollinators are currently suffering owing to a host of direct and indirect anthropogenic pressures: land-use change, intensive farming techniques, harmful pesticides, nutritional stress, and climate change, among others. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to model the impacts on current global human health from insufficient pollination via diet. METHODS: We used a climate zonation approach to estimate current yield gaps for animal-pollinated foods and estimated the proportion of the gap attributable to insufficient pollinators based on existing research. We then simulated closing the "pollinator yield gaps" by eliminating the portion of total yield gaps attributable to insufficient pollination. Next, we used an agriculture-economic model to estimate the impacts of closing the pollinator yield gap on food production, interregional trade, and consumption. Finally, we used a comparative risk assessment to estimate the related changes in dietary risks and mortality by country and globally. In addition, we estimated the lost economic value of crop production for three diverse case-study countries: Honduras, Nepal, and Nigeria. RESULTS: Globally, we calculated that 3%-5% of fruit, vegetable, and nut production is lost due to inadequate pollination, leading to an estimated 427,000 (95% uncertainty interval: 86,000, 691,000) excess deaths annually from lost healthy food consumption and associated diseases. Modeled impacts were unevenly distributed: Lost food production was concentrated in lower-income countries, whereas impacts on food consumption and mortality attributable to insufficient pollination were greater in middle- and high-income countries with higher rates of noncommunicable disease. Furthermore, in our three case-study countries, we calculated the economic value of crop production to be 12%-31% lower than if pollinators were abundant (due to crop production losses of 3%-19%), mainly due to lost fruit and vegetable production. DISCUSSION: According to our analysis, insufficient populations of pollinators were responsible for large present-day burdens of disease through lost healthy food consumption. In addition, we calculated that low-income countries lost significant income and crop yields from pollinator deficits. These results underscore the urgent need to promote pollinator-friendly practices for both human health and agricultural livelihoods. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP10947.

Research priorities for global food security under extreme events.

Extreme events, such as those caused by climate change, economic or geopolitical shocks, and pest or disease epidemics, threaten global food security. The complexity of causation, as well as the myriad ways that an event, or a sequence of events, creates cascading and systemic impacts, poses significant challenges to food systems research and policy alike. To identify priority food security risks and research opportunities, we asked experts from a range of fields and geographies to describe key threats to global food security over the next two decades and to suggest key research questions and gaps on this topic. Here, we present a prioritization of threats to global food security from extreme events, as well as emerging research questions that highlight the conceptual and practical challenges that exist in designing, adopting, and governing resilient food systems. We hope that these findings help in directing research funding and resources toward food system transformations needed to help society tackle major food system risks and food insecurity under extreme events.

Exploring connections between pollinator health and human health.

Despite recent advances in understanding the role of biodiversity in ecosystem-service provision, the links between the health of ecosystem-service providers and human health remain more uncertain. During the past decade, an increasing number of studies have argued for the positive impacts of healthy pollinator communities (defined as functionally and genetically diverse species assemblages that are sustained over time) on human health. Here, we begin with a systematic review of these impacts, finding only two studies that concomitantly quantified aspects of pollinator health and human health. Next, we identify relevant research relating to four pathways linking pollinator health and human health: nutrition, medicine provisioning, mental health and environmental quality. These benefits are obtained through improved pollination of nutritious crops and an estimated approximately 28 000 animal-pollinated medicinal plants; the provisioning of pollinator-derived products such as honey; the maintenance of green spaces and biocultural landscapes that improve mental health; and cleaner air, water and food resulting from pollinator-centred initiatives to reduce agrochemical use. We suggest that pollinator diversity could be a proxy for the benefits that landscapes provide to human health. This article is part of the theme issue 'Natural processes influencing pollinator health: from chemistry to landscapes'.

CropPol: A dynamic, open and global database on crop pollination.

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and inform management actions. Here, we present CropPol, a dynamic, open, and global database on crop pollination. It contains measurements recorded from 202 crop studies, covering 3,394 field observations, 2,552 yield measurements (i.e., berry mass, number of fruits, and fruit density [kg/ha], among others), and 47,752 insect records from 48 commercial crops distributed around the globe. CropPol comprises 32 of the 87 leading global crops and commodities that are pollinator dependent. Malus domestica is the most represented crop (32 studies), followed by Brassica napus (22 studies), Vaccinium corymbosum (13 studies), and Citrullus lanatus (12 studies). The most abundant pollinator guilds recorded are honey bees (34.22% counts), bumblebees (19.19%), flies other than Syrphidae and Bombyliidae (13.18%), other wild bees (13.13%), beetles (10.97%), Syrphidae (4.87%), and Bombyliidae (0.05%). Locations comprise 34 countries distributed among Europe (76 studies), North America (60), Latin America and the Caribbean (29), Asia (20), Oceania (10), and Africa (7). Sampling spans three decades and is concentrated on 2001-2005 (21 studies), 2006-2010 (40), 2011-2015 (88), and 2016-2020 (50). This is the most comprehensive open global data set on measurements of crop flower visitors, crop pollinators and pollination to date, and we encourage researchers to add more datasets to this database in the future. This data set is released for non-commercial use only. Credits should be given to this paper (i.e., proper citation), and the products generated with this database should be shared under the same license terms (CC BY-NC-SA).

Negative impacts of dominance on bee communities: Does the influence of invasive honey bees differ from native bees?

Invasive species can reach high abundances and dominate native environments. One of the most impressive examples of ecological invasions is the spread of the African subspecies of the honey bee throughout the Americas, starting from its introduction in a single locality in Brazil. The invasive honey bee is expected to more negatively impact bee community abundance and diversity than native dominant species, but this has not been tested previously. We developed a comprehensive and systematic bee sampling scheme, using a protocol deploying 11,520 pan traps across regions and crops for three years in Brazil. We found that invasive honey bees are now the single most dominant bee species. Such dominance has not only negative consequences for abundance and species richness of native bees but also for overall bee abundance (i.e., strong "numerical" effects of honey bees). Contrary to expectations, honey bees did not have stronger negative impacts than other native bees achieving similar levels of dominance (i.e., lack of negative "identity" effects of honey bees). These effects were markedly consistent across crop species, seasons and years, and were independent from land-use effects. Dominance could be a proxy of bee community degradation and more generally of the severity of ecological invasions.

Opportunities to reduce pollination deficits and address production shortfalls in an important insect-pollinated crop.

Pollinators face multiple pressures and there is evidence of populations in decline. As demand for insect-pollinated crops increases, crop production is threatened by shortfalls in pollination services. Understanding the extent of current yield deficits due to pollination and identifying opportunities to protect or improve crop yield and quality through pollination management is therefore of international importance. To explore the extent of "pollination deficits," where maximum yield is not being achieved due to insufficient pollination, we used an extensive dataset on a globally important crop, apples. We quantified how these deficits vary between orchards and countries and we compared "pollinator dependence" across different apple varieties. We found evidence of pollination deficits and, in some cases, risks of overpollination were even apparent for which fruit quality could be reduced by too much pollination. In almost all regions studied we found some orchards performing significantly better than others in terms of avoiding a pollination deficit and crop yield shortfalls due to suboptimal pollination. This represents an opportunity to improve production through better pollinator and crop management. Our findings also demonstrated that pollinator dependence varies considerably between apple varieties in terms of fruit number and fruit quality. We propose that assessments of pollination service and deficits in crops can be used to quantify supply and demand for pollinators and help to target local management to address deficits although crop variety has a strong influence on the role of pollinators.

A global-scale expert assessment of drivers and risks associated with pollinator decline.

Pollinator decline has attracted global attention and substantial efforts are underway to respond through national pollinator strategies and action plans. These policy responses require clarity on what is driving pollinator decline and what risks it generates for society in different parts of the world. Using a formal expert elicitation process, we evaluated the relative regional and global importance of eight drivers of pollinator decline and ten consequent risks to human well-being. Our results indicate that global policy responses should focus on reducing pressure from changes in land cover and configuration, land management and pesticides, as these were considered very important drivers in most regions. We quantify how the importance of drivers and risks from pollinator decline, differ among regions. For example, losing access to managed pollinators was considered a serious risk only for people in North America, whereas yield instability in pollinator-dependent crops was classed as a serious or high risk in four regions but only a moderate risk in Europe and North America. Overall, perceived risks were substantially higher in the Global South. Despite extensive research on pollinator decline, our analysis reveals considerable scientific uncertainty about what this means for human society.

Areas Requiring Restoration Efforts are a Complementary Opportunity to Support the Demand for Pollination Services in Brazil.

Crop pollination is one of Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) that reconciles biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. NCP benefits vary across space, including among distinct political-administrative levels within nations. Moreover, initiatives to restore ecosystems may enhance NCP provision, such as crop pollination delivered by native pollinators. We mapped crop pollination demand (PD), diversity of pollinator-dependent crops, and vegetation deficit (VD) (vis-a-vis Brazilian legal requirements) across all 5570 municipalities in Brazil. Pollinator-dependent crops represented ∼55% of the annual monetary value of agricultural production and ∼15% of the annual crop production. Municipalities with greater crop PD (i.e., higher degree of pollinator dependence of crop production) also had greater VD, associated with large properties and monocultures. In contrast, municipalities with a greater diversity of pollinator-dependent crops and predominantly small properties presented a smaller VD. Our results support that ecological restoration prompted by legal requirements offers great potential to promote crop productivity in larger properties. Moreover, conservation of vegetation remnants could support food security in small properties. We provided the first steps to identify spatial patterns linking biodiversity conservation and pollination service. Using Brazilian legal requirements as an example, we show that land-use management policies may be successfully used to ensure agricultural sustainability and crop production.

Time to Integrate Pollinator Science into Soybean Production.

Soybeans cover 129 million hectares globally. Soybean productivity can increase with pollinator management, but soybean cultivation practices commonly ignore biotic pollination. If pollinator habitats are created within soybean landscapes and policies to limit agricultural expansion are implemented, millions of hectares could be restored for biodiversity without loss of soybean production.

Temporal Trends in Pollination Deficits and Its Potential Impacts on Chinese Agriculture.

Worldwide, there is increasing evidence that shows a decline in pollinators, limiting crop pollination and production. However, it is unclear to what extent Chinese agriculture could be impacted by pollinator deficits. Data for 84 major crops in China between 1961 and 2018 were analyzed for the temporal trends in crop area and production, agricultural economic contribution of pollination, crop yield deficits, and honey bee pollination demand. We found a rapid increase in agricultural dependence on insect pollinators: both the cultivated area and total production of pollinator-dependent crops increased faster than those of pollinator-independent crops during 1961-2018. The total economic value of pollination amounted to US$ 106.08 billion in 2010, representing 19.12% of the total production value of Chinese agriculture, approximately twice the 9.5% value estimated for global agriculture. Crops with higher pollinator dependence showed greater mean growth in cultivated area than those with lower dependence, but lower mean growth of crop production and yield. Crop yield growth was also more unstable with increasing pollinator dependence. The minimum pollination demand for honey bee colonies was about three times the stock of honey bee colonies available in 2018. Furthermore, we found a decline in crop yield deficit with the increase in honey bee colony pollination service capacity. We considered that the shortage of pollinators resulted in the yield deficits for pollinator-dependent crops. Future increase in the area of pollinator-dependent crops will increase the need for more pollinators, suggesting the importance of implementing measures to protect pollinators to ensure a better-secured future for agricultural production in China.

Building effective policies to conserve pollinators: translating knowledge into policy.

Pollination management recommendations are becoming increasingly precise, context-specific and knowledge-intensive. Pollination is a service delivered across landscapes, entailing policy constructs across agricultural landscapes. Diversified farming practices effectively promote pollination services. Yet it remains difficult to secure large-scale uptake by farming communities. A strong foundation upon which to base policy formulation stems from respecting the perspective of farmers and local communities on the need to conserve pollinators, alongside scientific understanding. Ecological intensification resonates with both indigenous knowledge, local communities and scientific understanding. It emphasizes that the regulating functions of nature require both landscape-level agroecosystem design and recognition of the complexity of agricultural systems. Facilitating ecological intensification across landscapes requires collective decision-making, with institutional innovation in local structures and food system governance.

Wild insect diversity increases inter-annual stability in global crop pollinator communities.

While an increasing number of studies indicate that the range, diversity and abundance of many wild pollinators has declined, the global area of pollinator-dependent crops has significantly increased over the last few decades. Crop pollination studies to date have mainly focused on either identifying different guilds pollinating various crops, or on factors driving spatial changes and turnover observed in these communities. The mechanisms driving temporal stability for ecosystem functioning and services, however, remain poorly understood. Our study quantifies temporal variability observed in crop pollinators in 21 different crops across multiple years at a global scale. Using data from 43 studies from six continents, we show that (i) higher pollinator diversity confers greater inter-annual stability in pollinator communities, (ii) temporal variation observed in pollinator abundance is primarily driven by the three-most dominant species, and (iii) crops in tropical regions demonstrate higher inter-annual variability in pollinator species richness than crops in temperate regions. We highlight the importance of recognizing wild pollinator diversity in agricultural landscapes to stabilize pollinator persistence across years to protect both biodiversity and crop pollination services. Short-term agricultural management practices aimed at dominant species for stabilizing pollination services need to be considered alongside longer term conservation goals focussed on maintaining and facilitating biodiversity to confer ecological stability.

Global trends in nature's contributions to people.

Declining biodiversity and ecosystem functions put many of nature's contributions to people at risk. We review and synthesize the scientific literature to assess 50-y global trends across a broad range of nature's contributions. We distinguish among trends in potential and realized contributions of nature, as well as environmental conditions and the impacts of changes in nature on human quality of life. We find declining trends in the potential for nature to contribute in the majority of material, nonmaterial, and regulating contributions assessed. However, while the realized production of regulating contributions has decreased, realized production of agricultural and many material commodities has increased. Environmental declines negatively affect quality of life, but social adaptation and the availability of substitutes partially offset this decline for some of nature's contributions. Adaptation and substitutes, however, are often imperfect and come at some cost. For many of the contributions of nature, we find differing trends across different countries and regions, income classes, and ethnic and social groups, reinforcing the argument for more consistent and equitable measurement.