Abstract
Pollination Investigators is a citizen science program designed to quantify the pollination service provided within home gardens. The goal of our initial study year was to develop and evaluate an experimental protocol using a survey to gather participant feedback. At three workshops held in the spring of 2014 we distributed sampling protocols along with eight (two of each species) sweet pepper, cucumber, tomato, and sunflower seedlings to 64 volunteers. Volunteers established the seedlings in their home garden and compared fruit weight and seed set among open pollinated flowers with flowers bagged to exclude insect visitors. At the end of the season only 14.1% of volunteers submitted any pollination services data. Using a follow-up survey, we identified the steps within our protocol that prevented volunteers from continuing with the project, and prescribe protocol revisions to improve volunteer retention when measuring garden pollination services.
Highlights
Worldwide, 35% of the global food supply is highly reliant on animal-mediated pollination (Klein et al 2007; Nicholls and Altieri 2013)
Developing a citizen science program often involves a compromise between an ideal statistical design and ensuring sufficient levels of participation to meet the program goals (Pocock et al 2015)
We conclude that citizen scientists are willing and able to follow a relatively complex protocol to establish and collect data from multiple pollination services treatments
Summary
35% of the global food supply is highly reliant on animal-mediated pollination (Klein et al 2007; Nicholls and Altieri 2013). Citizen science has proven useful in examinations of pollinator distributions and declines (Matteson et al 2012; Moskowitz and Haramaty 2013; Stafford et al 2010), responses to climate change (Breed et al 2012), population genetics (Harpur et al 2015), detection of exotic species (Ashcroft et al 2012; Wal et al 2015), nesting and hive properties (Graham et al 2014; Lye et al 2012; Sponsler and Johnson 2015), pesticide impacts (Muratet and Fontaine 2015), responses to habitat and landscape features (Bates et al 2014; Everaars et al 2011; Kremen et al 2011), migrations (Davis et al 2012; Howard and Davis 2015; 2009), overwintering (Howard et al 2010), disease dynamics (Satterfield et al 2015), and larval survivorship (Nail et al 2015)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
