Pollination in Agroecosystems: A Review of the Conceptual Framework with a View to Sound Monitoring

Abstract

The pollination ecology in agroecosystems tackles a landscape in which plants and pollinators need to adjust, or be adjusted, to human intervention. A valid, widely applied approach is to regard pollination as a link between specific plants and their pollinators. However, recent evidence has added landscape features for a wider ecological perspective. Are we going in the right direction? Are existing methods providing pollinator monitoring tools suitable for understanding agroecosystems? In Italy, we needed to address these questions to respond to government pressure to implement pollinator monitoring in agroecosystems. We therefore surveyed the literature, grouped methods and findings, and evaluated approaches. We selected studies that may contain directions and tools directly linked to pollinators and agroecosystems. Our analysis revealed four main paths that must come together at some point: (i) the research question perspective, (ii) the advances of landscape analysis, (iii) the role of vegetation, and (iv) the gaps in our knowledge of pollinators taxonomy and behavior. An important conclusion is that the pollinator scale is alarmingly disregarded. Debate continues about what features to include in pollinator monitoring and the appropriate level of detail: we suggest that the pollinator scale should be the main driver.

Biodiversity Evaluation: From Endorsed Indexes to Inclusion of a Pollinator Indicator

“…Advances in landscape analysis make it possible to optimize descriptions of land/soil use, albeit at different levels of detail, depending on the database used. Proper identification of landscape can no longer be excluded from monitoring plans [41], and this is also currently supported by the number of indicators that include cartographic information (Tables 1 and 2). Similarly, standardization is important to monitoring.…”

Pollinators and policy: the intersecting path of various actors across an evolving CAP

“…However, monitoring can be carried out also at the national level, through national monitoring plans: in Italy, that is the case of the Italian BeeNet (Giovanetti and Bortolotti, 2021), fostered by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry through the National Rural Network. Monitoring projects, at any landscape level, are exploding worldwide (Giovanetti et al ., 2021), dedicated to given pollinators (butterflies, bees, syrphid flies, honeybees) or all of them as a group, to given environments (agroecosystems, parks and urban contexts included), or individual plant species (cultivated and spontaneous). While it is certainly very important to raise awareness among citizens (i.e., through the citizens’ science approach applied to pollinators monitoring), still, above all actions that the EU and MSs will foster, those of major and sudden impact on pollinators’ conservation are related to changes in agricultural practices.…”

Local Actions to Tackle a Global Problem: A Multidimensional Assessment of the Pollination Crisis in Chile

“…The information, gathered via the citizen science initiatives, revealed the important contribution of such activities in developing knowledge at large scales [127]. However, implementing a good citizen-science monitoring scheme for pollinators can be a complex endeavor [128]. On the one hand, most of the pollinatormonitoring endeavors are biased toward honeybees and crop pollination, while native pollinators and pollination interactions in natural areas remain largely underrepresented.…”

“…On the one hand, most of the pollinatormonitoring endeavors are biased toward honeybees and crop pollination, while native pollinators and pollination interactions in natural areas remain largely underrepresented. On the other hand, even in countries with a long citizen science history (e.g., the USA and many European countries), the lack of taxonomic expertise can be a major shortcoming, biasing citizen-science records against native and rare species [128]. Thus, a comprehensive monitoring-that includes citizen science-will allow to assess and understand the deep sense of commitment and the great level of awareness that local stakeholders (citizens, farmers, authorities) have regarding the pollination crisis.…”