Pollinator diversity, pollination services and landscape change

That’s the title (or part of it) of a guest editorial ((Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Catrin Westphal (2008) The interplay of pollinator diversity, pollination services and landscape change. Journal of Applied Ecology 45(3), 737–741 doi:10.1111/j.1365-2664.2008.01483.x)) in the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Ecology which introduces a Special Profile entitled “Pollination and Pollinators” (mainly bees, actually).

The papers in this Special Profile cover several of these topics: two papers address the impact of habitat fragmentation and semi-natural landscape elements for population densities, species richness and community composition of bees (Brosi et al. 2008; Osborne et al. 2008). The next three papers focus on the combined effects of local and landscape-scale land use intensity and semi-natural or natural landscape elements on pollinators (Kohler et al. 2008; Rundlöf, Bengtsson & Smith 2008; Winfree et al. 2008). The last two papers focus on pollination functions and consider cross-pollination rates in a major crop (Devaux et al. 2008) and plant–pollinator networks in heathlands (Forup et al. 2008).

The papers are behind paywalls, but the abstracts are still quite useful.

I guess the overall message is that “land use intensification and habitat fragmentation do not only affect pollinator diversity and abundance, but also pollination services” because “pollination success of insect-pollinated plant species is usually not dependent on single, highly specialized pollinator species, but rather on a diverse community of pollinators.” In some places, of course, bees have lots more to contend with.

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