Modelling Landscapes for Resilient Pollination Services in the UK

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Pollination services by wild insects, such as bees and hoverflies, can increase the total output of UK crop production by hundreds of millions of pounds annually. Changes in climate and land use can cause populations of these wild insects to decline and can displace certain species from their natural range. As a result, the pollination services provided by a community may decline or become very reliant upon a few key species. This greatly increases the economic risk posed to farmers, suppliers, retailers and consumers by further losses of pollinators, either as sudden, one time shocks or through the gradual impacts of pressures over a longer period. Changes to the landscape that affect pollinator populations will also affect the aesthetic and cultural value of the landscape for different people, potentially making them more or less willing to undertake measures to support pollinators, such as planting wildflower strips. At present, the exact impacts of various landscape and climate changes on pollinator populations and the pollination services they provide remains unknown.This project, involving a team of ecologists, economists and sociologists, builds on data collected from several other studies to measure and map the current availability of pollination services, including their economic benefits, across the UK and how resilient they are to plausible future changes in the physical or economic environment. The project is divided into four work packages: work package 1 will develop new methods to map pollinator populations across the UK, based on existing data and estimate the economic value of these pollinator populations. work package 2 will use existing data, and a small amount of new data, to examine the links between pollinator visits and economic output in four major UK crops (apples, strawberries, oilseed rape and field beans), and identify the key tipping points where services will be inadequate. work package 3 will use innovative social science techniques to examine how changes in the landscape that affect pollinators will impact upon different people's cultural values for those landscapes. Finally, work package 4 will work with stakeholders (e.g. farmers, policy makers, retailers) to develop a series of realistic and relevant future scenarios that each consider changes in: i) the climate; ii) markets for different crops (which affects how much is planted); and, iii) wider land use. Combining information from all of the work packages, the project will examine how these changing conditions will affect pollinator populations, the economic benefits of the pollination services they provide and the impacts that changes in the landscape affecting pollinators will have on social values. The project will then examine the capacity of pollinator populations to recover their service providing potential after sudden events (e.g. extreme weather) under each scenario, as well as the vulnerability of crop markets to declines in pollinated crop production abroad. Throughout, the project will be supported by a steering committee of stakeholders who will work with the project team to ensure the outcomes are the most realistic and relevant to UK food systems. The projects outcomes, including detailed maps of pollinator populations and pollination services across the UK under current and future conditions and new information on people's landscape preferences, will be used to produce new outreach materials (in collaboration with a specialist artist), policy briefs and discussion workshops for a wide range of stakeholders.