Strengthening links between agri-environment management and pollination services for cost-effective bee conservation

动物授粉对英国农作物产量的贡献价值6.3亿英镑，然而传粉者仍然面临着不可持续的土地利用和管理做法的巨大压力。我们最近的工作表明，在英国的大部分地区，授粉服务都存在严重的赤字，这主要是由于栖息地的丧失和同质化。虽然在恢复和保护传粉者方面有政策和农业方面的利益，但我们缺乏必要的信息来将不同的传粉者访问率与经济效益联系起来，并量化生态系统服务的提供。这限制了我们量化试图减少传粉者损失或增加传粉者数量的政策或农场管理行动的经济影响的能力。该项目试图通过结合几种定量分析方法来克服这一挑战，从关于传粉益处的二元信息转移到了解传粉者访问的微小变化如何影响作物产量。将特别注意探索这种关系是如何变化的(例如，作物种类、土壤养分浓度、无法解释的变化)，以捕捉当地农业条件和不确定性的变化，并促进我们的结果的应用。然后，这些关系将被用来测试传粉者管理做法的成本和收益，这些做法是由案例研究农民共同开发的，以适应他们符合当前政策的具体农场管理战略。

The contribution of animal pollination to UK crop production is valued at £630M, yet pollinators are still under significant pressure from unsustainable land use and management practices. Our recent work has demonstrated that there are significant deficits in pollination services across much of the UK due largely to habitat losses and homogenization. Although there is policy and agricultural interest in restoring and conserving pollinators, we lack the necessary information to link different rates of pollinator visitation to economic benefits and quantify ecosystem service provision. This limits our ability to quantify the economic impacts of policies or farm management actions that attempt to mitigate pollinator losses or increase pollinator populations.This project seeks to overcome this challenge by combining several quantitative analysis approaches to move from binary information about pollination benefits to an understanding of how small changes in pollinator visitation affect crop yield. Special attention will be paid to exploring how this relationship varies (e.g., between crop species, soil nutrient concentrations, unexplained variation) in order to capture variations in local farming conditions and uncertainty and to facilitate application of our results. These relationships will then be used to test the cost and benefits of pollinator management practices, co-developed by case study farmers to fit their specific farm management strategies in line with current policy.