Bee diversity and abundance in a livestock drove road and its impact on pollination and seed set in adjacent sunflower fields

Hevia, Violeta; Bosch, Jordi; Azcárate, Francisco M.; Fernández, Eduardo J.; Rodrigo, Anselm; Barril-Graells, Helena; González, José A.

doi:10.1016/j.agee.2016.08.021

Cited by 39 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Even in a small area of sunflower cultivation (100 m 2 ), a high number of bee species was recorded, corroborating previous studies carried out in Brazil (Morgado et al, 2002), United States (Parker, 1981;Greenleaf & Kremen, 2006), Spain (Hevia et al, 2016) and South Africa . Taking into account the 20 species sampled in sunflower heads, 50% were highly eusocial species.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Bee Pollination Highly Improves Oil Quality in Sunflower

Silva¹,

Godoy²,

Jacob³

et al. 2018

Sociobiology

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Sunflower is a pollinator-dependent crop and one of the most cultivated oilseeds in the world, supporting important sectors of the agricultural industry, such as the food supply, because it is an important source of vitamin E and unsaturated fatty acids for human health. Although it is well stablished that bee pollination improves sunflower seed set, it is still unknown if pollinators influence the nutritional composition. Considering the economic importance of sunflowers for several Brazilian agricultural sectors, the aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the bee community for (1) achene quality (weight and nutritional composition) and (2) market value. Exclusion experiments were performed with hybrid sunflowers and showed that bee pollination enhanced the achene weight by 91 %, the levels of vitamin E by 45 % and unsaturated fatty acids by 0.3 %. Also, it was estimated that due to the pollination services provided by bees, the grower of the sunflower cultivar used in this study nearly duplicates the sale value of the achenes per hectare of cultivated area. Thus, the current study highlights the importance of bees as providers of cross- and self-pollination to nutritional quality of sunflower achenes and provides useful baseline figures to further evaluations of the effects of pollinators on human diets and health.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Bee Pollination Highly Improves Oil Quality in Sunflower

Silva¹,

Godoy²,

Jacob³

et al. 2018

Sociobiology

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“…Meanwhile, the transhumant herds graze on the drove road only at the end of the spring, following a "green wave" when the plants have already grained, relatively untouched during the flowering phase. While a greater coefficient of inbreeding is a genetic indicator that can be related to pollinator limitation (Turner et al 1982, Dutech et al 2005, Van Etten et al 2015, the structural role of drove roads as grassland corridors crossing agricultural landscapes has been proved to be determinant in supporting pollinator services (Hevia et al 2016), which our study confirms. This result goes along other studies that have observed provision of heterogeneity at the landscape level because of the drove road's structural role, translated in higher biodiversity levels (Azcárate et al 2013a;Hevia et al 2013).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…Drove roads -routes traditionally used for mobile pastoralist livestock in many regions of the world -become particularly interesting to promote functional connectivity between isolated grasslands. Historic ones are presumed to often derive from ancient migratory routes of wildlife (Manzano Baena & Casas 2010) Drove roads have been observed to have a strong effect in increasing multifunctionality of the landscape by working as linear grasslands and increasing heterogeneity at the large scale, translating into an increase of biodiversity in diverse taxonomic groups such as plants (Azcárate et al 2013a), ants (Azcárate et al 2013b;Hevia et al 2013) or even bees, linked with important pollination services (Hevia et al 2016). Given the proven capacity of livestock in achieving long-distance dispersal along drove roads, both by endozoochory (Manzano et al 2005) and by epizoochory (Manzano & Malo 2006), mobile pastoralism taking place in drove roads could potentially mitigate the consequences of population isolation, which is a major outcome of fragmentation processes (Fahrig 2003;Mitchell et al 2015), especially in a grassland context (Pretelli et al 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pollen flow also depends on landscape connectivity, where the structural features of the landscape that harbors pollinator communities (Auffret et al 2017) are more relevant for it than the existence of functional seed-dispersal vectors. This is a factor that seems especially relevant for fragmented agricultural landscapes crossed by livestock corridors, as the latter are reported to harbor a significant pollinator community (Hevia et al 2016). Wind pollination in angiosperms seems to have evolved in cases where biotic pollinators are limited (Culley et al 2002) and long-distance flow would be achieved in less common cases of high wind turbulence and speed, both very dependent on topography (Auffret et al 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Peer Review #2 of "Herbivore corridors sustain genetic footprint in plant populations: a case for Spanish drove roads (v0.2)"

Castilla¹

2019

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Habitat fragmentation is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem productivity that are mediated by direct human impact. Its consequences include genetic depauperation, comprising phenomena such as inbreeding depression or reduction in genetic diversity. While the capacity of wild and domestic herbivores to sustain long-distance dispersal has been proven, the impact of herbivore corridors in plant population genetics remains to be observed. We conducted this study in the Conquense Drove Road in Spain, with a sustained use by livestock during centuries where transiting herds passed by twice a year en route to winter and summer pastures. We compared genetic diversity and inbreeding coefficients of Plantago lagopus populations in the drove road with populations in the surrounding agricultural matrix, at varying distances from human settlements. We observed significant differences for coefficients of inbreeding between the drove road and the agricultural matrix, as well as significant trends for higher genetic diversity and population nestedness around human settlements. Trends for higher genetic diversity in drove roads may be present, although they were only marginally significant with the available sample size. The resulting functional landscape has human settlements as dispersal hotspots, while the drove road would confirm its pollinator reservoir role observed in other studies, and possibly also as a linear structure facilitating long-distance dispersal in an agricultural matrix where local P. lagopus populations depend rather on short-distance dispersal. These results highlight the role of herbivore corridors for conserving the migration capacity of plants, and they contribute as well in understanding the role of dispersal related to human activities for the spread of invasive species.

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“…For example, coffee bushes closer to forest fragments experience greater fruit set (Ricketts et al 2004), watermelon fields close to natural habitat exhibited greater pollen deposition (Kremen, Williams, and Thorp 2002), and sunflowers closer to natural vegetation strips receive greater pollination services than those further away (Hevia et al 2016). Syntheses examining pollination success across many crops show that while agroecosystems vary in their decay function, the overarching trend is a significant decrease in pollination service with increasing distance from natural habitat (Garibaldi et al 2011a;Klein et al 2008;Ricketts et al 2008).…”

Section: Landscape Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intersection between biodiversity conservation, agroecology, and ecosystem services

Liere

Jha

Philpott

2017

Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

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Agroecological research has improved our understanding of the drivers and benefits of biodiversity, thus providing the scientific basis needed to achieve agricultural multifunctionality. We review how agroecology has contributed to our understanding of the effects of local and landscape level drivers on beneficial insects, as well as on the ecosystem services they provide. Several syntheses from agroecosystem research indicate that both populations and biodiversity of pollinator and natural enemies decline with increases in local agricultural intensification and that landscape composition and configuration may mediate these local scale effects. Changes in agricultural management may affect predation and pollination services by altering the resource base for natural enemies and pollinators, by altering their species pool, and by modifying their interactions. The effects of these drivers depend on taxonomical or functional groups and landscape context. Studies that directly measure the cascading effects of landscape drivers on pest control and pollination services and plant level benefits are sparse. We propose five research themes to improve our understanding of the interface of agroecology, conservation, and ecosystem service research.

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Bee diversity and abundance in a livestock drove road and its impact on pollination and seed set in adjacent sunflower fields

Cited by 39 publications

References 67 publications

Bee Pollination Highly Improves Oil Quality in Sunflower

Bee Pollination Highly Improves Oil Quality in Sunflower

Peer Review #2 of "Herbivore corridors sustain genetic footprint in plant populations: a case for Spanish drove roads (v0.2)"

Intersection between biodiversity conservation, agroecology, and ecosystem services

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