A global meta‐analysis reveals contrasting impacts of air, light, and noise pollution on pollination

Understanding how systemic biases in uence local ecological communities is essential for developing just and equitable environmental practices that center both human and wildlife wellbeing. With over 270 million United States residents inhabiting urban areas, understanding the socio-ecological consequences of racially-targeted zoning, such as redlining, will prove critical for urban planning. There is a growing body of literature documenting the relationships between redlining and the inequitable distribution of environmental harms and goods, green space cover and pollutant exposure. However, it remains unknown whether historical redlining impacts the distribution of urban noise or whether inequitable noise drives an ecological change in urban environments. We conducted 1) a spatial analysis of how urban noise corresponds with the distribution of redlining categories and 2) a systematic literature review to summarize the effects of noise on wildlife in urban landscapes. We found strong evidence that noise is inequitably distributed in redlined urban communities across the United States, and that inequitable noise may drive complex biological responses across diverse urban wildlife, reinforcing the interrelatedness of socio-ecological outcomes. These ndings lay a foundation for future research that advances relationships between acoustic and urban ecology through centering equity and challenging systems of oppression in wildlife studies.

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Anthropogenic noise can decrease tomato reproductive success by hindering bumblebee-mediated pollination

Varga-Szilay,

Szövényi,

Pozsgai

2024

Preprint

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Anthropogenic noise is a little-studied type of pollution that negatively affects the physiology, nervous function and development of insects, thereby it has the potential to disrupt even key ecological services such as pollination. Here, we investigate the effects of anthropogenic noise on the pollination success of the Bombus terrestris on tomatoes in controlled conditions. We expect that bumblebees avoid flowers exposed to noise more than flowers in non-noisy environments, leading to less efficient pollination and lower fruit quality. The experiment was conducted in Hungary, in 2023. Three treatments were applied to randomly chosen flowers: noisy (with played traffic noise); and two non-noisy, one allowing bumblebees and one excluding them. The flowers were enclosed with nets before maturity to avoid pollination, opened exclusively during treatment, and re-enclosed for three more days post-treatment. We recorded the marketing value of the fruits and the number of seeds they produced. We found no significant differences in the marketing value of fruits among treatments, but the number of seeds differed significantly suggesting that anthropogenic noise has a substantial effects on bumblebee-mediated pollination. Although these effects may be mitigated by habituation, loud external noise of various machines (e.g. irrigation systems) within polytunnels is still likely to contribute to the everyday noise exposure of bumblebees and could thus potentially lead to hidden economic losses in production. Therefore, further research is needed to understand the behavioural effects of both direct and indirect noise pollution on bumblebees.

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A global meta‐analysis reveals contrasting impacts of air, light, and noise pollution on pollination

Cited by 6 publications

References 126 publications

Effects of Air Pollutants on Biodiversity

Effects of Air Pollutants on Biodiversity

Inequalities in noise will affect urban wildlife

Anthropogenic noise can decrease tomato reproductive success by hindering bumblebee-mediated pollination

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