There’s so much good science and so many great talks coming out of the (broad) field of pollinator and pollination research at the moment! Here’s a few things that have come up on my radar. Feel free to comment and add your own examples of things I may have missed.

• The effects of the decline of a keystone plant species on a dune community plant-pollinator network by Dan Sandacz and colleagues is a nice example of what can happen when plants that provide important nectar and/or pollen resources are lost from a community.
• Phylogenetic reconstruction and mapping of pollination systems indicates the dominance of “Insect pollination for most of angiosperm evolutionary history” say Ruby Stephens and co authors, which I don’t think is a huge surprise but it’s nonetheless great to see this laid out so clearly and (given my forthcoming book) the relatively high frequency of transitions to vertebrate pollination. See also their commentary in The Conversation.
• Full disclosure, I was one of the reviewers of Pollinators and plants as ecosystem engineers: post-dispersal fruits provide new habitats for other organisms by João Cardoso et al., and I know that there was quite a bit of back and forth between authors, editor and reviewers about what the findings really meant and how best to frame them. My view was that this study should be published because it’s another demonstration of the importance of pollinators and their interactions with plants that goes beyond the obvious outcomes of plant reproduction and support of pollinator populations.
• Non-Forest Woody Vegetation: A Critical Resource for Pollinators in Agricultural Landscapes—A Review by Małgorzata Bożek and colleagues provides a summary of a rather important but neglected topic.
• Again, full disclosure, I reviewed Adriano Valentin-Silva’s Reproductive biology of Piper species (Piperaceae): a review to link the past to the future, because it’s an important and diverse genus that I’ve had a long-standing interest in, and deserves an up to date summary of its reproduction.
• Global distribution and evolutionary transitions of floral symmetry in angiosperms by Yunyun Wang et al. challenges some earlier conclusions about the relationship between zygomorphy and plant diversification.
• Pollination crisis Down-Under: Has Australasia dodged the bullet? by Graham Pyke, Kit Prendergast & Zong-Xin Ren gives a southern hemisphere perspective on current concerns about loss of pollinators.
• Dark-centred umbels in Apiaceae: diversity, development and evolution gives a broader perspective to Darwin’s original speculations about wild carrots, which is something else that has intrigued me for many years.
• Peter Bernhardt’s recent lecture “So You Want to Study Orchid Pollination” is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0wFvm6PFYk
• This seminar on pollinators and plant conservation in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa by Anton Pauw was extremely interesting: https://sabotanyblog.wordpress.com/saab-webinar-recordings-2023/