Many of our everyday foods rely on pollinators but these animals – bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, birds, bats, rodents and even lizards – appear to be in decline. A new study sets out a strategy for pollinators that will help ensure we still have tomatoes, kiwi-fruit, runner-beans, apples, brazil nuts and courgettes on our plates.
Scientists have tracked population trends for a few hundred species of bee, mostly in temperate regions of northern Europe and North America. But more than 20,000 species have been identified and it’s near impossible to monitor them all.
“The ones to have been studied are often from iconic groups like bumblebees, which are big and colourful species,” says Ignasi Bartomeus from the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain.
Long term data are lacking from many other parts of the world, leaving us somewhat in the dark as to how pollinators are faring.
From the early Victorian naturalists collecting insects in their own gardens, to the conservation volunteers of today, an army of citizens has been keeping watch for more than 100 years
Lynn Dicks
Nonetheless, we do know that pollinator decline is being driven by agricultural expansion, agricultural intensification, including increased use of pesticides, and climate change.
“We can predict that pollinator declines of the magnitude seen in Europe and North America are occurring in Asia and Latin America, and starting to occur in Africa, but we can’t test this prediction with scientific data at the moment,” says Lynn Dicks from the University of East Anglia, UK.
Together Bartomeus and Dicks identified the gaps in our knowledge concerning pollinators, investigated why those gaps exist, and looked at what needs to be done to conserve pollinators.
One of the main barriers the scientists identify is the difficulty of accessing historic data. In their paper in Environmental Research Letters (ERL) they write that one of the first actions needs to be “redoubling the efforts to make historical data on species occurrences, interactions and traits openly available and easy to integrate across databases”.
But the pair also believe that research culture and the way that funding is allocated need to change. “Researchers are usually rewarded for leading projects and generating new ideas, but less so for collaboration and monitoring,” says Bartomeus. “Upscaling and testing the generality of ideas and participating in large collaborations should be more valued to stimulate coordinated collaborations.”
When it comes to gathering data Bartomeus and Dicks envisage citizen scientists playing a major role. “All the standard monitoring and recording schemes that have provided long-term data for Europe and North America are run and conducted by volunteers,” says Dicks. “From the early Victorian naturalists collecting insects in their own gardens, to the conservation volunteers of today, an army of citizens has been keeping watch for more than 100 years.”
Finally, Bartomeus and Dicks believe that there needs to be a fundamental shift in research infrastructures, to allow integration of social, economic and ecological approaches, and to encourage collaboration between stakeholders, including scientists, managers, members of the public and farmers.
“As a community, it would be a huge step forward to create comparable protocols and experiments by consensus that can be adopted by any researcher or citizen science project and collected in central places,” they write.
