Author Archives: Jeff Ollerton

About Jeff Ollerton

Independent consulting scientist and author, working on understanding and conserving biodiversity

Pollinators and politics in China

Last week I returned from a 14 day visit to China to colleagues at the Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan, part of a three-year commitment to working there that I documented on the blog last year, starting here. Some of my recent trip involved a long weekend in the city of Nantong, just north of Shanghai, where I was an invited speaker at the International Pollinator Insect Biology and Pollination Symposium. During a full day of talks from researchers and practitioners, via the excellent simultaneous interpretation service provided by the organisers, we learned about recent developments in the world of Chinese honey bees and wild pollinators. There were also international guest speakers from Australia, Argentina, and the UK, in person and online.

Too much was presented to give you a full account of the meeting – if you’re interested in details I’ve uploaded a copy of the English version of the symposium brochure here – but several themes emerged that I think are worth noting.

First of all, a number of speakers commented on the growing realisation in China that the value of crop pollination services by honey bees (both the native Asian Apis cerana and the European A. mellifera) far outweighs the value of the hive products such as honey, wax and royal jelly – see this from the 2021 study by Shibonage K Mashilingi and colleagues:

The total economic value of pollination amounted to US$ 106.08 billion in 2010, representing 19.12% of the total production value of Chinese agriculture

In comparison, the global honey market was valued at just US$ 9.01 billion in 2022. That such an understanding of the much greater economic value of pollinators to agriculture was relatively slow in coming is perhaps not surprising – it’s easier to weigh a physical product than it is to assess the contribution of bees and other insects to an apple harvest, for instance. But this awareness is a crucial step towards understanding the many reasons why pollinators need protection.

Which leads me to my next point: there was considerable political interest in the conference and in the topic more broadly. The meeting opened with almost an hour of introductory remarks by high-ranking Chinese officials, including the Vice Mayor of the regional government, the Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the Secretary General of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. All of them commented on the importance of pollination to both crops and wild plants, and the need to reduce the amount pesticides being used in Chinese agriculture. I can’t recall ever being in a pollination symposium in any other country where there was such a political presence. I think that it says a lot about the Chinese willingness to translate science and technology into government policy and actions.

At the end of the opening session I had the chance to talk briefly with Liu Jian, former Vice Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. Via an interpreter we agreed on the importance of pesticide reduction for protecting pollinators, a theme he had emphasised strongly in his talk, and I presented him with a copy of my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society:

Following the opening addresses there was a talk by the President of the Apicultural Science Association of China, Prof. Peng Wenjun, who gave us “An overview of the development of China’s bee pollination industry”. He described pollinators as the “invisible pillar” of agriculture, which is a wonderful phrase, and set out a strategy for greater integration of government policies, science, and technological innovation in order to support both managed and wild pollinators.

The first set of talks ended about 6pm, then it was back to the hotel for a quick dinner, before returning to the venue for a set of 15 shorter, but no less excellent, talks by postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers. This over-ran slightly and finally drew to a close at about 10pm, signalling the end of a very long, but very stimulating, day.

The following morning we were up early for a tour of some local agricultural facilities, including a high-tech glasshouse demonstration project and a loquat orchard that included trees which are thought to be around 300 years old. The thing that links these two contrasting agricultural systems is the requirement for managed pollinators to produce a crop: bumblebees (Bombus spp.) in the case of glasshouse tomatoes and the Asian honey bee (Apis cerana) for the winter-flowering loquat. Here are some photographs from that trip:

My sincere thanks to the organisers of the symposium for the invitation to speak and to my colleagues Zong-Xin Ren, Scarlett Howard, Yuansheng Fu, and Carlos Matallana-Puerto for their companionship on the trip. I’m grateful also to our personal translator-guides Yang and Gao who surprised us at the airport and made us feel so welcome:

AI at the crossroads: can ChatGPT turn you into a statistical Robert Johnson?

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When it comes to the statistical analysis of data, I know my limits. Maths was never my strong point at school or university, and my approach has always been to keep analyses as simple and straightforward as possible*, or to rely on colleagues with fancier statistical chops to do the heavy lifting. I wish that were not the case – I wish I had a brain that was more number-focused than it is. But I don’t and I’ve learned to live with it, to play to my actual strengths as a scientist, and to collaborate with others who can bring different skills to the party.

In theory, the development of the R platform was supposed to make life easier for those of us who wanted to analyse complex data sets. But actually having to script, from scratch, the code to carry out even simple analyses always seemed to me to be a step backwards from the push-button days of SPSS or Minitab. Yes, I get that R is incredibly powerful and flexible and blah blah. But it still involves a heavy time commitment and an aptitude for writing code that many of us struggle with.

Recently, however, things have changed. I find myself carrying out complex statistical analyses that would have stumped me 12 months ago. Not only that, but I now understand those tests on a much deeper level than I ever did before. I also feel much more confident in the interpretation of the outputs from the tests I’m running, and their limitations.

Why the over night change? ChatGPT.

More precisely, I’m using ChatGPT to help me decide which analytical approaches are best for the data that I have, getting it to help me to write the R script to carry out the tests, and then (crucially) it’s advising me on the interpretation of the statistical output and suggesting future steps.

Let me give you an example. I’ve just submitted a manuscript to a journal which describes the results from an experiment that had confounded me for years, which is why I’d not published the work previously. Following discussions with some colleagues in China I realised that my framing of the work was wrong (by coincidence, a topic that Jeremy Fox has recently discussed over on the Dynamic Ecology blog). However, there was still a contradiction in two of the sets of results that I could not resolve: they should have been telling me the same thing but they were not. When I queried ChaptGPT on this it suggested that I model the data taking into account the fact that I had missing data – missingness in statistical jargon. When I did – bingo! – the results made sense: the absence of some data in my experimental treatments had systematically biased the results. It all made perfect sense.

Now, I could have talked this over with a statistician or a more statistically-minded ecologist colleague. But scientists are busy people and I did not want to impose on someone’s limited time. Or rather multiple someone’s limited times, because I know from past experience that when you ask folks these sorts of questions you can get different advice depending upon their own experiences, training, or preferred flavours of statistical analysis. By treating ChatGPT as a collaborator I can get an objective answer to my data questions, written in a way that I can understand. That last point is key because for all of us with specific expertise it’s sometimes difficult to translate our knowledge into broadly interpretable language.

How can I know that ChatGPT is giving me reliable statistical advice? It certainly didn’t give me accurate information about Erasmus Darwin a couple of years ago (a story, incidentally, that I included in my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship). But since then, the reliability and accuracy of ChatGPT has improved considerably and when I’ve checked the information it’s given about analyses it was usually accurate as far as I can gauge. In one case, however, it completely missed the point of what I was trying to do with another set of data. But of course advice from human collaborators can also be inaccurate – everyone is fallible. So including human (my!) oversight in all of this is important.

I’m certainly not the only one using ChatGPT and other AI platforms in this way – here’s a small sample of some online articles I’ve found on the topic:

I especially like this quote from that last article:

“If I hired a consultant to write the code when I told them what I needed, would that be a problem? Then, what’s the problem in doing stats with an (AI) consultant?”

I can only agree, and again, I emphasise that we need to think of AI as a collaborator as much as a tool.

By now you might be wondering what any of this has got to do with blues musician Robert Johnson**. Well, according to legend, Johnson was initially a fairly mediocre guitar player. His overnight transformation into a brilliant and highly influential guitarist was attributed to him meeting the Devil at a local crossroads and trading his soul for the mastery of his instrument.

Of course the story is nonsense, and Johnson clearly worked hard at his craft, but it feels like a nice metaphor of where we are at the moment: at a crossroads when it comes to how we use AI, with the opportunity for it to turn us, overnight, into experts. Will that come at a profound cost? Are we selling our souls to some kind of digital Devil? AI naysayers claim it will and we are. But as with all technological advancements, from the wheel to the internet, there are both good and bad aspects to it. Only time will tell whether the former outweighs the latter. In the meantime, let’s try to discover how best to use this amazing technology for our own and society’s benefits.

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*In fact one of my recent data papers involved no statistical analysis at all because the results were so clear cut: to paraphrase the abstract, when East African lowland honey bees encountered other insects on flower heads, those other insects were displaced 100% of the time. That’s not a result that requires any kind of test.

**Blues is one of my favourite genres of music and this is not the first time it’s featured on the blog. When Karin and I returned to the UK in March 2024 one of the first things that I got involved with was helping to kick-start a regular blues evening featuring professional British and international players. The not-for-profit initiative is called Harborough Blues – check out the website for upcoming gigs.

Image credit: ChatGPT of course, under instruction from me

Letters to my past and future

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It’s five years to the day since I left the University of Northampton. On that day, encouraged by Karin, I wrote two letters. One was “To the past” and the other was “To my future”. Once I’d written them they were sealed and tied up with a length of twine that we’d used as a timeline exercise.

This morning I opened the letters and thought about how far I (we) have come in the last five years. It was emotional but life-affirming to read those words to my past and future self. I’ll not go into the details of what I wrote – they will remain private – suffice to say, some of what I wanted to do has come to pass, some has not, and things that I never imagined would be possible have taken place!

If there’s a point to this story it’s that doors move in two directions – they open and they close. Big Life Decisions like leaving academia (or any other job for that matter) are really scary but they should not hold you back. I’m happier and healthier than I was five years ago and, while I won’t pretend that leaving my professorship behind was easy or that there’s been difficult times during the past half decade, it was one of the best decisions that I ever made.

So thank you to all of my colleagues and friends who have helped me on this journey, and especially to Karin for all her support.

Book review: “Urban Plants” by Trevor Dines

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Earlier this year I received an unexpected invitation from Bloomsbury Publishing to attend a book launch at Philip Mould’s gallery in London. Looking at the details I immediately said yes, because it combined three of my passions: natural history, art, and books! Not only that, but the topic of the book was one very close to my heart – the wildlife of our towns and cities.

Urban Plants is the latest addition to Bloomsbury’s British Wildlife Collection, a stunningly produced series that has set a new benchmark for natural history literature in this country. The author, Trevor Dines, formerly worked for the charity Plantlife, and is a real authority on urban botany. My expectations for this book were very high! So on the day of the book launch, Karin and I trundled down to the capital and spent part of the day at the National Gallery where, among other things, we enjoyed an exhibition by José María Velasco. As well as being a superb documenter of the 19th century landscapes of Mexico, Velasco was also profoundly interested in botany. We’d not planned it that way, but it was a nice coincidence.

The book launch itself was well attended and I found myself catching up with a few familiar faces from the world of British wildlife, and Trevor (whom I’d corresponded with but never met) treated us to a short reading:

I took the opportunity to buy a copy, had a quick chat with Trevor, who kindly signed the book, and then we headed back to catch a train.

So what do I think of Urban Plants?

It’s actually hard to praise the book too much without sounding unnecessarily gushy! But it really is one of the best books that I’ve read for a long time. In part that’s because it stirs deep emotions of me as a child, taking my first faltering steps into the world of natural history on the bomb sites and post-industrial landscapes of my native Sunderland. But it’s more than that: the author writes with elegance and authority on a topic about which he’s deeply passionate, and this comes through on every one of the amply illustrated pages. Trevor should be congratulated on producing a book that will be the go-to reference on the topic for many years to come.

And an important topic it is too: there’s no doubt naturalists who will sneer at the idea of urban botany, but (as the author points out) for many people in this country, the plants that they see every day in their home towns are almost their only connection to wildlife. For that reason alone it’s a subject to be taken seriously, and if a book like this can inspire more people to take a closer look at the plants with which we share our streets, roofs and walls, so much the better.

So do yourself a favour and take a walk with Trevor through the complex ecology and botany of built-up British landscapes. I learned a lot from Urban Plants and I highly recommend it as an addition to anyone’s Christmas list.

Do birds pollinate the iconic Golden Lotus? A new study suggests that they do!

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The Golden Lotus (Musella lasiocarpa) is one of China’s most iconic plants — a striking member of the banana family (Musaceae) that seems to bloom forever. Its brilliant yellow, lotus-like bracts have long made it a favourite of subtropical gardeners, though it also has utility as a food and fibre crop, and is associated with Chinese Buddhism. As you can see above it often features stylistically in Chinese temples, and in my visits to Yunnan we frequently encounter it during fieldwork on farms, planted to support terraced fields:

But despite its fame, one mystery has lingered for decades: what actually pollinates it?

Until now, Musella was thought to rely mainly on insects, particularly bees, for pollination. That assumption made it something of an outlier within the banana family, where most species are pollinated by birds or bats. But a new study, in which I was involved as part of an international team of predominantly Chinese and Brazilian researchers, has turned that view on its head.

By combining careful field observations with citizen science records, our team found that the Golden Lotus is regularly visited by an impressive diversity of birds — twelve species from five different families. As I documented in my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationships, many of these visitors, such as bulbuls and sunbirds, are known nectar-feeders, and their behaviour at the flowers suggests that they are acting as effective pollinators. This discovery significantly expands what we know about the pollination ecology of the Golden Lotus, and places it firmly within the broader pattern of bird pollination that characterises much of the banana family.

Interestingly, the plant’s features — large, robust, vividly coloured bracts, abundant accessible nectar, and long-lived blooms — make perfect sense in this new light. These are traits that favour bird pollination rather than the short, concentrated visits typical of bees.

But the significance goes beyond one species. Bird pollination plays a vital, and often overlooked, role in China’s native flora, linking ecosystems from tropical rainforests to mountain valleys. Understanding these relationships is important not only for biodiversity conservation but also for horticulture — helping gardeners and landscape designers to create spaces that attract and sustain pollinators of all kinds.

The Golden Lotus has always been celebrated for its beauty and longevity. Now, we can add another layer to its story: a reminder that even the most familiar plants can still surprise us, and that nature’s partnerships are often more complex — and more colourful — than we imagine.

Here’s the reference with a link to the paper, which is open access:

Albuquerque-Lima, S., Ferreira, B. H. d. S., Rech, A. R., Ollerton, J., Lunau, K., Smagghe, G., Li, K.-Q., Oliveira, P. E., & Ren, Z.-X. (2025). Beyond Bees: Evidence of Bird Visitation and Putative Pollination in the Golden Lotus (Musella lasiocarpa)—One of the Six Buddhist Flowers—Through Field Surveys and Citizen Science. Plants, 14(20), 3157. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants14203157

Pollinators need more space and 10% habitat is not enough says a new study just published in Science

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Pollinators such as wild bees, butterflies, and hoverflies are in trouble worldwide. A major new study, published in Science and led by Gabriella Bishop and other scientists at Wageningen University & Research, shows that the oft-quoted figure of 10% semi-natural habitat in farmland landscapes is far too little to safeguard pollinators. Instead, the evidence points to a need for somewhere between 16% and 37% habitat cover, depending on the type of pollinator, if we are serious about halting declines. Suitable habitats include hedgerows, patches of woodland, species-rich grasslands, and flowering margins, and as a general rule, hoverflies need less of it whilst bumblebees and butterflies require more.

I was fortunate to play a part in this global assessment, contributing an unpublished dataset collected with my former PhD student, Sam Tarrant, who studied plant-pollinator interactions on restored landfill and established grassland sites. Seeing those data joined with dozens of other studies from around the world underlines something we have known for years: no single dataset, however carefully gathered, can give us the whole picture. To really understand what is happening to biodiversity—and to design conservation solutions that work—we need these kinds of global, mega-author syntheses that draw together evidence from many landscapes, taxa, and approaches.

The message from this analysis is stark but hopeful. More habitat means more pollinators, across all groups. Richer habitats with abundant flowers give an additional boost, but the overriding priority must be to increase the sheer area of natural habitat in farmed landscapes. Small-scale fixes like wildflower strips offer short-term benefits, but without enough space they can’t deliver recovery at scale. Long-term, secure habitat creation—on the order of decades, not seasons—is what pollinators, farmers, and ecosystems need.

Although the policy debate in Europe provided the backdrop for this study, the lessons (and the data) are global. Wherever agriculture dominates, the health of pollinator populations—and by extension our food security and biodiversity—depends on our willingness to give these insects the space and quality of habitat they require.

Looking ahead, we need to think bigger and work together. That means more international collaborations, more sharing of data, and more commitment to long-term solutions that transcend borders. The image at the start of this post is from my trip back to China in July this year. I deliberately chose it because, as you’ll see from the map below which is taken from the paper, there was no suitable data available for the study from that country. Or from Africa. Or Australasia. Or from most of tropical South America. That shows that as pollination ecologists we need to coordinate more in advance on these types of syntheses, and maximise the value of the kinds of data that we collect. The main take away from this study, however, is that if we want to reverse the declines in biodiversity, scientists, policymakers, businesses, farmers, and citizens all have a role to play. Pollinators remind us that nature is interconnected and global—our conservation efforts must be, too.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the study:

Bishop, G.A., Kleijn, D., Albrecht, M., Bartomeus, I., Isaacs, R., Kremen, C., Magrach, A., Ponisio, L.C., Potts, S.G., Scheper, J., Smith, H.G., Tscharntke, T., Albrecht, J., Badenhausser, I., Åström, J., Báldi, A., Basu, P., Berggren, N., Beyer, N., Blüthgen, R., Bommarco, B.J., Brosi, H., Cohen, L.J., Cole, K.R., Denning, M., Devoto, J., Ekroos, F., Fornoff, B.L., Foster, M.A.K., Gillespie, J.L., Gonzalez-Andujar, J.P., González-Varo, J.P., Goulson, D., Grass, I., Hass, A.L., Herrera, J.M., Holzschuh, A., Hopfenmüller, S., Izquierdo, J., Jauker, B., Kallioniemi, E.P., Kirsch, F., Klein, A.-M., Kovács-Hostyánszki, A., Krauss, J., Krimmer, E., Kunin, B., Laha, S.A.M., Lindström, Y., Mandelik, G., Marcacci, D.I., McCracken, M., Monasterolo, L.A., Morandin, J., Morrison, S., Mudri Stojnic, J., Ollerton, J., Persson, A.S., Phillips, B.B., Piko, J.I., Power, E.F., Quinlan, G.M., Rundlöf, M., Raderschall, C.A., Riggi, L.G.A., Roberts, S.P.M., Roth, T., Senapathi, D., Stanley, D.A., Steffan-Dewenter, I., Stout, J.C., Sutter, L., Tanis, M.F., Tarrant, S., van Kolfschoten, L., Vanbergen, A.J., Vilà, M., von Königslöw, V., Vujic, A., WallisDeVries, M.F., Wen, A., Westphal, C., Wickens, J.B., Wickens, V.J., Wilkinson, N.I., Wood, T.J., Fijen, T.P.M. (2025) Critical habitat thresholds for effective pollinator conservation in agricultural landscapes. Science 389: 1314-1319

Here’s the abstract:

Biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes is declining, but evidence-based conservation targets to guide international policies for such landscapes are lacking. We present a framework for informing habitat conservation policies based on the enhancement of habitat quantity and quality and define thresholds of habitat quantity at which it becomes effective to also prioritize habitat quality. We applied this framework to insect pollinators, an important part 5 of agroecosystem biodiversity, by synthesizing 59 studies from 19 countries. Given low habitat quality, hoverflies had the lowest threshold at 6% semi-natural habitat cover, followed by solitary bees (16%), bumble bees (18%), and butterflies (37%). These figures represent minimum habitat thresholds in agricultural landscapes, but when habitat quantity is restricted, marked increases in quality are required to reach similar outcomes.

Surveying for Pollinators: join me for an online live webinar on 2nd October!

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On Thursday, October 2 at 6:30pm, I’m running an online webinar on the theme of Surveying for Pollinators. Follow that link for more details and to book a ticket.

Here’s an overview of what I’ll be covering:

Pollinators like bees, butterflies, hoverflies and even beetles play a vital role in keeping our ecosystems thriving. They help plants reproduce, support biodiversity, boost food production, and contribute billions to the global economy. Beyond their ecological importance, they’re also excellent indicators of environmental health — when pollinators are doing well, nature usually is too.

But how do we actually find out what’s happening with pollinators?

In this webinar, we’ll explore the fascinating world of pollinator surveys — from simple, hands-on methods anyone can try, to more advanced techniques used by experienced entomologists and ecologists. You’ll get an overview of popular approaches, including:

Flower-Insect Timed Counts – A quick and accessible method inspired by the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS).
Transect Walks – Great for spotting pollinators along a fixed route and comparing habitats.
Plant-focused sampling – for when you really want to delve deep into the pollinators of a species.
Trapping methods – including pan traps, vane traps, Malaise traps, and moth traps.
Camera Traps – A non-intrusive way to capture who’s visiting flowers when you’re not looking.

We’ll break down the pros and cons of each technique, which approaches are best suited to the question being asked, what to consider before starting your own survey, and how your efforts can feed into national monitoring schemes like PoMS, the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, and BeeWalk.

Whether you’re a curious beginner, a budding citizen scientist, a research student, or a conservation professional, this session will give you the knowledge and tools to design a pollinator survey that fits your goals — and helps protect the buzz behind biodiversity.

The 90-minute event will consist of a 1-hour presentation followed by a Q&A with the tutor using questions provided by the live audience.

The presentations will be recorded and shared with those who booked, alongside Q&A transcripts and relevant links following the event via a password-protected website.

A new review gives us a deeper understanding of the evolution of plant-pollinator interactions

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If you’ve read my book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, you’ll know that I spend a few pages discussing the long-standing paradigm of how interactions between plants and their pollinators evolve and result in the formation of new plant species. This is referred to as the Stebbins (or Grant-Stebbins) Most Effective Pollinator Principle (MEPP). The MEPP is fairly straightforward and intuitive: flowers evolve their colour, shape, scent, rewards, and so forth as adaptations to the type of flower visitor that successfully moves the most pollen between flowers.

However, the MEPP is not the only Principle in town – there’s also Aigner’s Least Effective Pollinator Principle (LEPP) which is not so intuitive. In the LEPP, flowers can adapt to pollinators that are less successful at pollination, as long as those adaptations do no interfere with the pollination services provided by other flower visitors.

As I note in Birds & Flowers, we don’t know which of these Principles is more frequent in nature, because the LEPP has been much less intensively studied than the MEPP. That’s in part because it’s less well known, but also because the field work and experimental procedures required to test the LEPP are much more challenging.

Hopefully this is about to change with the publication of a brilliant critical review of the MEPP by pollination ecologists Kathleen Kay and Bruce Anderson published in the journal Annals of Botany, entitled: Beyond the Grant–Stebbins model: floral adaptive landscapes and plant speciation. The paper is open access – follow that link and you can download a copy.

Kathleen and Bruce discuss not just the MEPP v the LEPP, but also other ways in which flowers can evolve, framed around the idea of floral evolution as movement across an “adaptive landscape,” where plants are not shaped only by one pollinator but by the need to maximise overall reproductive success. This perspective allows us to explore how flowers evolve when influenced by multiple pollinators, how transitions between floral forms take place, and how speciation occurs through a combination of factors beyond pollination alone. It emphasises that pollinators are important drivers of floral change, but speciation is more likely when divergence happens across several aspects of a plant’s ecology, not just through its flowers.

It’s a great review and well worth your time reading in detail. Perhaps my favourite line in the paper comes from the abstract: “The Grant–Stebbins model, while inspiring decades of empirical studies, is a caricature of pollinator-driven speciation and explains only a limited range of adaptive outcomes.” This is something that many of us have been arguing for years: the natural world is extremely complex, so we should not expect these ecologically critical interactions between flowers and their pollinators to have simple origins or ecologies.

Join me for a “Birds & Flowers” talk in Cambridge on the 12th September!

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If you are in or around Cambridge next week, I’m giving a talk on Friday 12th September at the Cambridgeshire Bird Club about my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship.

The event takes place in the Wilkinson Room, St. John’s Church, Hills Road. Doors open at 7pm and the talk begins at 7.30pm. There’s a £2.00 charge for non-members – more details can be found by following this link.

I’ll bring copies of both Birds & Flowers and Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, if anyone wants to buy a signed book.

I hope to see you there!

Why are there large gaps in the British distribution of Common Elder?

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Back in mid-April, Karin and I spent a long weekend in the New Forest, exploring the walking trails around the village of Brockenhurst and watching the bird life of the coastal wetlands near Lymington. After a few days something odd struck me: the hedgerows and woodland edges in the area contained almost no Common Elder (Sambucus nigra). Why is that odd? Well, in the article I wrote about Common Elder in 2022 for British Wildlife, I described the plant as ‘so commonplace that we hardly give it a second glance’. Common Elder is such a ubiquitous species that, as Sherlock Holmes observed in The Adventure of Silver Blaze, its absence in a landscape struck me as a ‘curious incident’.

At first I thought that I was so preoccupied with the New Forest’s birds and other wildlife and just not spotting elder, which early in the season, before it flowers, tends to merge into the general greenery of the countryside. Because elder is everywhere, right? In fact this map from the Biological Flora of the British Isles account of the species showing the occurrence of the species in 10km squares suggests just that:

Similarly, if you look at the distribution map of Sambucus nigra from the NBN Atlas, it also appears that it’s everywhere, a big blob of elderlyness across the whole country:

That’s not surprising, I can imagine you’re thinking, after all its berries are eaten by a range of birds and mammals, that disperse its seeds far and wide. It’s just the kind of species that you would expect to be widespread across the country. Which of course it is – it’s a very common species. But once you focus more closely on specific parts of Britain you see that there are some striking gaps in where elder is commonly found. Indeed one of these elder lacunae is in and around the New Forest:

So my impression was correct – the New Forest really is an elder cold spot, along with most of the Isle of Wight. Zoom back out and we see that this lacuna is part of a wider band of elder absence that extends across the southeast of England. There’s also gaps further west, in Somerset and in Devon.

It’s not just in southern England that these elder lacunae occur – look at its absence from much of Lincolnshire, for instance:

What’s going on here? Why do these gaps in the distribution of this common species occur? Part of the answer is that, being so common, Common Elder tends not to be recorded because naturalists often focus on rare and unusual species, neglecting the commoners. This form of bias is often encountered when dealing with biodiversity databases – we found it in our study of trends in diversity and abundance of Neotropical pollinators, for instance. I’m certain that this is a factor in the NBN Atlas account of Common Elder, because if we look at a part of Britain with which I am very familiar, centered on the town of Northampton, I know for a fact that elder is extremely abundant even if the map suggests otherwise:

But lack of records cannot be the only answer to these gaps: Common Elder really is not very common in the New Forest – I’ve (not) seen it with my own eyes! So what else could be going on? It doesn’t seem to relate to underlying geology or soil type, and indeed Common Elder is tolerant of a wide range of edaphic conditions: the Biological Flora account shows that it occurs on sandy, chalky and loamy soils, ranging from pH 4.2 to pH 8.7. So I wonder if the answer has a more cultural basis? Has Common Elder been actively removed from some areas in the past, perhaps because of its supernatural associations (something that I discussed in my article) or, more prosaically, because it’s believed by farmers to be toxic to stock, or just not a very good hedging plant?

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, please comment below or send me a message via my Contact page.