Abstract
Insects pollinate many globally important crops and therefore rapid and effective means to measure crop pollinators and pollination are required to support national monitoring schemes and allow localised measurements of pollinator supply and demand to crops. We tested user-friendly protocols for assessing pollinators and pollination in crops to better understand the capacity and willingness of a group of farmers and citizen scientists to implement such techniques in the field. We asked the different recorder groups including farmers and agronomists, non-expert volunteers and experienced researchers to complete three pollinator and pollination service assessment techniques: transect walks, pan trapping and pollinator exclusion and supplementary pollination. Recorders provided feedback on each method through a questionnaire and the data collected using different methods were compared. Our volunteer members of the public, and farmers and agronomists were able to implement all assessment techniques in apple, bean and oilseed rape fields. The experienced researchers and volunteer members of the public were more willing to record bumblebees to species level on transects than the farmers and agronomists. There was also a significant interaction between recorder and crop type for certain insect taxa demonstrating that in certain crops some taxa may be easier to record than others. All our recorder groups found transects and pan traps straightforward and enjoyable to implement. Our non-expert volunteers were willing to use pollinator exclusion and supplementary pollination techniques as part of a wider scheme, the farmers and agronomists who implemented the technique were less positive about applying this method more widely. We have demonstrated that volunteer recorders, including farmers and agronomists, can be engaged and are able to implement methods to assess pollinators and pollination, although additional training is necessary to ensure accurate species data collection. For the more direct and time consuming measures of pollination service, both training and additional support may be needed, particularly for farmers. The tools developed and tested here will be valuable for wider pollinator monitoring schemes and for integration into standard agronomic practices.
Highlights
Insects provide a critical ecosystem service by pollinating crops of global importance (Kleijn et al, 2015; Rader et al, 2016), yet increasing demand for insect pollinated crops (Aizen et al, 2008) and evidence of pollinator declines (Potts et al, 2016; Powney et al, 2019) threaten this service
The three recorder groups were able to implement our pollinator and pollination service survey techniques in the field, generating data on pollinator abundance and implementing techniques to allow for assessment of pollination service to all three study crops
Our study shows that volunteers, including farmers, agronomists and members of the public with little prior experience, are able to implement pollinator surveys and pollination service assessment techniques in fields of different crops
Summary
Insects provide a critical ecosystem service by pollinating crops of global importance (Kleijn et al, 2015; Rader et al, 2016), yet increasing demand for insect pollinated crops (Aizen et al, 2008) and evidence of pollinator declines (Potts et al, 2016; Powney et al, 2019) threaten this service. Current understanding of the changing status and trends of insect pollinators (focussing on bees and hoverflies) is predominantly based on ad-hoc records of species presence collected and verified by expert volunteer recorders, from which changes in occupancy or distribution can be modelled over time (Carvalheiro et al, 2013; Powney et al, 2019) While this is invaluable in providing evidence of the changing occurrence of pollinator species across larger scales, these unstructured records are rarely collected in intensive agricultural landscapes or in flowering crop fields directly as recorders will often choose areas of high diversity (Isaac and Pocock, 2015). These schemes incorporate improved spatial coverage and better representation of different habitats, but to effectively capture trends in crop pollinator populations and their activity in crops data need to be collected from within the fields themselves
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