A World Without Bees: simulating important agricultural insect pollinators

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The project plans to develop a software model to assess the viability of crops under changes in pollinator populations, and recommend which floral traits should be breeding targets to ensure sustainable crops. Insects are essential to agriculture, but their populations are changing in poorly understood ways that are likely to affect human food supplies. This project plans to construct evolutionary agent-based models of change in crop-pollinating insects: honeybees, bumblebees, stingless bees and flies. It then plans to model how these population changes affect production, predicting floral traits to breed into crop plants for ongoing pollination success. Another expected outcome is a flexible plant–pollinator simulation of insect-specific visual perception, foraging behaviour, physiological factors and inter-species interactions.