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 eff...

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Intersection between biodiversity conservation, agroecology, and ecosystem services

The benefits of insect pollination to crop yields depend on genetic and environmental factors including plant self-fertility, pollinator visitation rates, and pollinator efficacy. While many crops benefit from insect pollination, such variation in pollinator benefits across both plant cultivars and growing regions is not well documented. In this study, across three states in the northern Great Plains, United States, from 2016 to 2017, we evaluated the pollinator-mediated yield increases for 10 varieties of confection sunflowers, Helianthus annuus L. (Asterales: Asteraceae), a plant that is naturally pollinator-dependent but was bred for self-fertility. We additionally measured pollinator visitation rates and compared per-visit seed set across pollinator taxa in order to determine the most efficacious sunflower pollinators. Across all locations and hybrids, insect pollination increased sunflower yields by 45%, which is a regional economic value of over $40 million and a national value of over $56 million. There was, however, some variation in the extent of pollinator benefits across locations and plant genotypes, and such variation was significantly related to pollinator visitation rates, further highlighting the value of pollinators for confection sunflowers. Female Andrena helianthi Robertson (Hymenoptera: Andrenidae) and Melissodes spp. (Hymenoptera: Apidae) were the most common and effective pollinators, while other bees including managed honey bees (Hymenoptera: Halictidae), Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), small-bodied sweat bees (Hymenoptera: Halictidae), bumble bees Bombus spp. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), and male bees were either infrequent or less effective on a per-visit basis. Our results illustrate that wild bees, in particular the sunflower specialists A. helianthi and Melissodes spp., provide significant economic benefits to confection sunflower production.

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Native Solitary Bees Provide Economically Significant Pollination Services to Confection Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus L.) (Asterales: Asteraceae) Grown Across the Northern Great Plains.

Disentangling the diversity of definitions for the pollination ecosystem service and associated estimation methods

Experimental quantification of insect pollination on sunflower yield, reconciling plant and field scale estimates

The Nature’s Contribution to People (NCP) framework builds on the Ecosystem Services (ES) concept and aims to incorporate social sciences more inclusively into economic and ecological aspects of ES. Given the emphasis of NCP around social issues, it is our hypothesis that NCP framework is well positioned to analyse complex socio-ecological systems (SES) where human-nature interactions are heavily linked, such as pastoral systems. In this article, a qualitative comparative analysis was conducted to explore trends throughout the literature on pastoral systems and the viability of the NCP framework to analyse pastoral systems as a SES with strong human-nature interactions. We found that the NCP framework allows for an intuitive translation from ES. Our results show that the NCP Habitat creation and maintenance, Food and feed, and Supporting identities are the most connected to pastoral systems in the scientific literature. Given the emphasis of the NCP framework on non-material aspects of human-nature systems and the ease with which it can be applied to the literature, we suggest that the NCP framework can be complementary to the ES framework to allow for a more complete analysis of SES with strong human-nature connections.

Eva Fernández

Papers

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