Hedgerow restoration promotes pollinator populations and exports native bees to adjacent fields.
Summary (3 min read)
INTRODUCTION
- Habitat enhancement within farms is thought to be an important component for restoring ecosystem services in intensive agricultural landscapes.
- Increasingly, growers and scientists are recognizing the value of conserving and/or restoring native bee populations as an alternative to such heavy reliance on honey bees for global crop pollination (Winfree 2010, Menz et al. 2011).
- There is a surprising lack of information on how hedgerow and other within-farm enhancements impact biodiversity and ecosystem services, especially considering the large amounts of money spent annually on habitat restoration in the European Union and United States (Kleijn et al. 2006, Winfree 2010).
- Yet, little is known about how restoration of field edges will impact entire pollinator communities and how restored areas will impact biodiversity and abundance of pollinators in adjacent crop fields (Winfree 2010).
Study design
- The study was conducted in California’s Central Valley in the summers of 2009 and 2010.
- Within each year the authors chose hedgerows that were adjacent to processing tomato fields, one of the most common crops in the region, in order to ensure that sites shared similar crop backgrounds.
- Plants in bloom were identified and floral cover per species was estimated using seven bins for percent cover scores.
- Pans were placed out in the morning, ;18 m apart on the ground along the hedgerow or control edge, in an alternating color pattern.
- The authors conducted timed aerial netting, capturing bees and syrphid flies visiting flowers in edges.
Site characteristics
- Examining differences by sample round, however, revealed some unexpected findings.
- In mid- and late summer, floral cover at control sites declined, but cover at hedgerow sites remained constant.
- There was significantly more dead wood (a potential nesting resource for tunnel and cavity nesters) at hedgerow sites than at control sites (F1,14 ¼ 10.40, P ¼ 0.006).
Collection method
- The authors hypothesized that pollinators might be more attracted to floral resources than they were to pan traps.
- If so, abundance in pan traps should be negatively correlated with floral cover (Baum and Wallen 2011).
- LORA A. MORANDIN AND CLAIRE KREMEN832 Ecological Applications Vol. 23, No. 4 H1 : pollinator abundances are lower along distance transects located in fields adjacent to hedgerow edges compared to distance transects adjacent to control edges.
Field edge pollinators
- —For pan-trapped specimens, there were no detectable differences in native bee abundance, richness, diversity, or community structure between hedgerow and control edges (Table 1).
- This gives an indication of the number and proportion of species that are unique to the floral resources at hedgerow and control sites compared to species that are present at both site types.
- Syrphid richness and diversity did not differ between the two site types, but there were more uncommon syrphid species in pans at hedgerow than at control sites (F1,14¼ 5.73, P ¼ 0.03).
- There were no significant differences in syrphid community composition between the two site types.
In-field pollinators
- —For pan-collected specimens, there was no interaction between distance and treatment, and no difference in abundance of native bees in pan traps at hedgerow and control sites, but there was a significant decrease with distance into fields at both site types (F1, 125 ¼ 12.42, P ¼ 0.001).
- Further examination of differences among distances revealed that there were significantly more bees at 10 m than at 100 and 200 m (P , 0.05) into the field, and no difference in abundance between 100 and 200 m.
- —For pancollected specimens, there was no difference in honey bee abundance, in syrphid abundance and richness between site types, or effect of distance.
- For visual observations, there was a marginally significant interaction effect between field treatment and distance into the field on honey bee abundance (F1, 174 ¼ 3.72, P ¼ 0.056; Fig. 4c); the authors therefore left the interaction in the model.
DISCUSSION
- Abundance, richness, and diversity of native bees and syrphid flower-visitors were enhanced in field edges by the presence of mature hedgerows, supporting their hypothesis that small, field-scale hedgerow restoration in intensively managed agricultural landscapes can benefit pollinator populations.
- Similar to their findings for native bees, Hannon and Sisk (2009) found that flowering shrubs in hedgerows were able to support native bee species that were otherwise uncommon in their agricultural landscape.
- Yet, whether florally enhanced areas act as exporters of pollinators to adjacent crops, or as concentrators of ambient populations, has received little attention in the literature.
- The difference between the pattern seen for syrphid flies and native bees could be due to life history differences between the groups.
- In addition to the enhanced floral abundance and consistency at hedgerow sites, the greater amounts of dead wood and woody vegetation at the hedgerow sites, as well as undisturbed ground suitable for rodent nesting, may have provided more nesting opportunities for these groups.
CONCLUSIONS
- The native perennial hedgerows had more abundant, diverse, and sustained floral resources than control edges, and showed some evidence of greater nesting resources for native bees.
- Both native bee and syrphid fly flower-visitors were more abundant and diverse on flowers in hedgerows than in control edges.
- Hedgerows resulted in higher alpha and beta diversity of pollinator species and supported native bee species that were uncommon in the landscape.
- The authors findings suggest that native perennial plant restorations are essential for maintaining local and landscape pollinator alpha and beta diversity, especially for maintaining less-common pollinator species.
- The semipermanent nature of the perennial plant hedgerows, with continuous floral resources in proximity to nesting habitat, probably resulted in the enhanced pollinator populations over multiple seasons.
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References
4,830 citations
"Hedgerow restoration promotes polli..." refers background in this paper
...Managed honey bees now provide pollination services for the majority of global food crops that require insect-mediated pollen transfer (Klein et al. 2007)....
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...Key words: biodiversity; Central Valley of California, USA; crop; ecosystem services; hedgerows; intensive agricultural landscape; native bees; pollination; restoration; syrphid flies....
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4,608 citations
"Hedgerow restoration promotes polli..." refers background in this paper
...…reliance on honey bees is becoming increasingly expensive and risky as managed honey bee colonies continue to decline in numbers in both North America and Europe (see Potts et al. 2010), coinciding with an increase in the proportion of crops that rely on insect pollination (Aizen and Harder 2009)....
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...Key words: biodiversity; Central Valley of California, USA; crop; ecosystem services; hedgerows; intensive agricultural landscape; native bees; pollination; restoration; syrphid flies....
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4,007 citations
"Hedgerow restoration promotes polli..." refers background or methods in this paper
...To further quantify abundance and diversity of flower visitors at our sites, we conducted visual observations in 1-m3 areas....
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...Bee and syrphid communities were compared statistically between site types using MRPP, with nonmetric multidimensional scaling for visual representation (McCune and Mefford 2006)....
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...We chose to compare the hedgerows to weedy field edges because it is the most prevalent edge type for crops in our region....
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...PC-ORD....
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...We assessed whether there were ‘‘indicator’’ species and genera of hedgerow or control sites (McCune and Mefford 2006)....
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1,271 citations
"Hedgerow restoration promotes polli..." refers background in this paper
...Key words: biodiversity; Central Valley of California, USA; crop; ecosystem services; hedgerows; intensive agricultural landscape; native bees; pollination; restoration; syrphid flies....
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...Loss of biodiversity in intensive agricultural landscapes has led to a reduction in ecosystem services that are essential for ensuring sustainable food production (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, Zhang et al. 2007)....
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