Category Archives: Pollination

Keeping up with pollination: using ChatGPT as a research alert

There is too much science.

That is not a complaint about the quantity of research being done. Quite the opposite: it is remarkable how much good work is now being published across the world. But the sheer volume creates a serious practical problem. How can any researcher keep track of what is relevant to their field, let alone read and properly absorb it?

For someone interested in pollination, the difficulty is compounded by the extraordinary breadth of the subject. Pollination is not confined to a single academic discipline, or even to a small cluster of them. It cuts across botany, zoology, ecology, evolution, conservation biology, agriculture, economics, food security, national security, palaeontology, biogeography, genetics, behaviour, climate science and many other areas.

A paper that changes how I think about pollination might appear in a specialist plant journal, an entomological publication, or journals covering conservation, agricultural economics, or palaeontology. It might concern the structure of ecological networks, the nutritional quality of crops, the evolution of flowers, pesticide regulation, the movements of migratory birds or the fossil record of insects. It may not even use the word “pollination” prominently in its title or abstract.

That breadth is one of the great attractions of a subject that has kept me fascinated for 35 years, and which I tried to capture in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. It is also what makes keeping up with it so challenging.

The limitations of conventional alerts

There are, of course, many ways to receive information about new research. Journals send tables of contents. Google Scholar provides alerts based on keywords or authors. ResearchGate regularly tells me that someone has cited one of my publications.

These services have their place, but they tend to provide a rather narrow window onto the literature.

For example, Google Scholar can alert researchers to newly indexed material matching a search query. This is useful, but it is neither a comprehensive record of everything published nor a carefully curated selection: broad searches produce noise, while narrow ones inevitably miss relevant work.

A citation alert from ResearchGate tells me about research connected to work that I have already published. That can be valuable, and occasionally flattering, but it inevitably looks backwards. It shows me the expanding wake of my own research rather than offering a broad view of where the subject is moving.

Keyword alerts have a different problem. They can generate large quantities of material with very little discrimination. A search for “pollination”, “pollinator” or “plant–pollinator interactions” will retrieve many relevant papers, but also conference notices, marginally related studies, duplicate records and work of highly variable importance.

More restrictive searches reduce the noise but risk excluding the unexpected paper that turns out to be especially interesting.

What I need is not simply a larger stream of titles. I want something closer to an informed research assistant: a system that could search widely, exercise some judgement, explain why particular items might matter, and alter its approach in response to my comments.

I have therefore been experimenting with ChatGPT’s scheduling function as a weekly research-alert system.

A scheduled conversation

My current instruction is for ChatGPT to provide a shortlist every Friday morning of the most worthwhile new papers, preprints, reports and substantive analyses relating to plant–pollinator interactions, pollination networks, bird pollination and related broader biodiversity topics.

I have asked it to include no more than ten items, and fewer when the available material is weak. That final qualification is important: I do not need ten references merely to fill ten spaces, I’d rather receive four genuinely interesting papers than a padded list containing six that I will never read.

For each item, the system can provide the citation, a short account of the main finding and an explanation of why it may be relevant to my interests. It can also distinguish between peer-reviewed research, preprints, reports and other forms of analysis.

In that sense, the alert is already more useful than a conventional automated search. But the most important difference is that it is a conversation.

I can tell it that a particular paper was especially useful and ask it to look for more work of that kind. I can point out that another item was only marginally relevant. I can ask it to widen its search into palaeontology, ecological economics or agricultural policy, or to pay closer attention to a particular taxonomic group.

I can also tell it what not to do. When a major European pollinator-research white paper appeared, for example, the alert quite reasonably identified it as relevant. But I was one of its co-authors and did not need an artificial intelligence system to introduce it to me as a new discovery. I could therefore instruct the system to recognise my own publications and either omit them or flag them only when they were strategically relevant.

That adaptability is difficult to reproduce with conventional keyword alerts. The scheduled search is therefore not a fixed filter, it can be refined as my interests, projects and frustrations change.

From retrieval to assessment

The distinction between finding research and assessing it is also important.

A long list of newly published papers transfers the problem of selection from the search engine to the researcher. A useful alert should do more than retrieve documents. It should offer some preliminary judgement about novelty, relevance and significance.

Does a paper introduce a genuinely new idea, or does it repackage a familiar concept in new terminology? Is a striking conclusion supported by a strong study design? Does a paper matter because of its empirical results, its methods, its conceptual framework or its policy implications? Is it directly relevant to my work, or merely adjacent to it?

ChatGPT cannot answer such questions infallibly. Nor should its assessment be accepted without scrutiny. But it can help to triage the literature and identify which papers deserve closer attention.

This is particularly valuable outside one’s immediate specialism. I can usually make a rapid initial judgement about a field study of flower visitors or a paper on pollination networks. I may need more assistance in deciding whether a new economic analysis, remote-sensing method or palaeontological reconstruction is likely to be important.

The purpose is not to delegate scientific judgement, it is to direct that judgement more efficiently.

A few necessary cautions

There are obvious limitations.

An AI-generated research brief is only as good as the literature it can locate and the instructions it has been given. It may miss relevant work, misunderstand a paper, exaggerate novelty or place too much weight on a fashionable topic.

There is also a danger of creating an intellectual echo chamber. If I repeatedly tell the system what interests me, it may become increasingly good at confirming those interests while overlooking research that sits outside them. A useful alert needs some permission to surprise.

For that reason, I think the instructions should combine a clear core remit with an explicit request to include occasional unexpected items that could change how the field is viewed.

The summaries themselves must also remain starting points. Important papers need to be read, methods inspected and conclusions considered in relation to the evidence. An articulate paragraph generated by ChatGPT is not a substitute for engaging with the original study.

A better kind of alert

Used carefully, however, scheduled ChatGPT alerts offer something that conventional notification services do not: an iterative relationship between the researcher and the search process.

The system can learn that I am interested not only in pollination as an ecological interaction, but also in its agricultural, economic, evolutionary, historical and political dimensions. It can respond when I say that a particular area is becoming more important to a project. It can explain its selections, accept criticism and search differently the following week.

That makes it less like an electronic table of contents and more like a research assistant who arrives on Friday morning with a small pile of papers and a cup of coffee and says: “These are the ones I think you should look at, and this is why.”

Like any research assistant, it will sometimes be wrong. It may overlook something obvious, become overenthusiastic about a weak paper or misunderstand why a study matters. But it can be corrected. The conversation continues, and the next briefing can be better.

For a field as broad and rapidly expanding as pollination research, that may be the most useful feature of all.

I will finish with an example. Today’s alert arrived at the scheduled 08:00 (though I had to make my own coffee…) and included four items for me to look at; this was the fourth, which I’m reproducing verbatim:

4. Agarwala et al. — Biodiversity loss will decrease the future creditworthiness of nations

The authors incorporate projected losses of wild pollination, tropical timber and marine fisheries into sovereign credit-risk models for 23 countries. Their scenarios suggest that partial ecosystem collapse could substantially increase national borrowing costs and expose a major omission in conventional credit ratings.

Why it matters: This is one of the clearer attempts to translate pollination loss from ecosystem-service valuation into a decision framework already used by governments and financial markets. For ecological-economics work, the methodological bridge—from spatial ecosystem-service scenarios through macroeconomic models to sovereign credit ratings—is more important than the headline monetary totals.

The ecological assumptions deserve scrutiny. “Wild pollination” is compressed into a tractable economic input, so uncertainty in crop dependence, substitution, adaptation and spatial mismatch may be obscured once propagated through the financial model.

Assessment: Strategically consequential interdisciplinary analysis, not new pollination biology.

The paper actually appeared on 4th June but I missed it, even though it cites this paper by Millard et al., in which I was involved, and presumably appeared on a ResearchGate citation alert last month. ChatGPT rightly spotted that it was something which would interest me and that’s what’s so fascinating about this approach to keeping up with the literature – this system is intelligent enough to “understand” my needs, even if it’s not conscious of precisely why it understands them.

As always, I’d be pleased to hear your views on this topic – feel free to comment below.

Bird pollination finally confirmed in Britain!

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In my book Birds & Flowers, I included a chapter called “The curious case of Europe”. The point of that chapter was simple enough: compared with much of the rest of the world, Europe appears to be oddly deficient in bird pollination. There are no hummingbirds, no sunbirds, no honeyeaters, and very few native plants that obviously look as though they have evolved with birds as their main pollinators. And it Britain, it appears that bird pollination is totally absent.

But “appears” is doing a lot of work there.

For decades, European bird–flower interactions have tended to be treated as marginal curiosities: Blue Tits taking nectar from willow catkins, warblers dusted with pollen, finches messing about in blossom. Interesting natural history, certainly, but not necessarily pollination. The assumption has usually been that insects do the serious work, and birds are at best incidental visitors.

A new paper in Journal of Ecology called “Generalist passerine birds perform a functional role as pollinators in temperate Europe“, by Sandra Anderson, George Perry and Rose Thorogood challenges that assumption in a very useful way. Working at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, they found that pollen transport by passerine birds was widespread. Most of the birds they sampled carried pollen, and several species — including Blue Tit, Blackcap, Chiffchaff, Wren, Redpoll and Bullfinch — regularly carried meaningful loads.

More importantly, they tested whether this mattered to the plants. By excluding birds from flowers while allowing insects access, they showed that fruit-set was reduced in several early-flowering woody plants, including Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) and Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica). In other words, the birds were not just getting dusty faces. They were contributing to plant reproduction.

I should say that I was one of the reviewers of this paper, so I have followed its development with particular interest. What I like about it is that it does not try to claim that Europe secretly has a hidden flora of classic “bird flowers”. These are not red tubular blossoms adapted to hummingbirds or sunbirds. They are familiar, open, pale, spring-flowering shrubs and trees. Nor are the birds specialised nectar-feeders. They are generalist passerines making use of seasonal resources.

That is precisely why the paper is interesting. It shifts the question from “does this look like bird pollination?” to “does bird visitation actually function as pollination?” That distinction matters. Pollination syndromes can be useful, but they can also blind us to interactions that do not fit the textbook categories.

The seasonal context is also important. These interactions peak early in spring, when willows, blackthorn and other woody plants are flowering, temperatures are still cool, insects may be unreliable, and birds are preparing to breed or arriving from migration. Under those conditions, even occasional bird visits could be valuable to plants needing pollen moved between individuals.

For me, this paper strengthens the argument I made in “The curious case of Europe”: Europe is not devoid of bird–flower interactions; rather, we have been looking for the wrong kind of bird pollination. Instead of obvious “ornithophilous” specialisation, we may have overlooked a more diffuse, opportunistic, generalist system involving common birds and common spring-flowering woody plants.

That may not be as spectacular as a hummingbird hovering at a tropical flower, but ecologically it is just as revealing.

The photo above is from Birds & Flowers and shows pollen on the face of a Eurasian Blue Tit in the early spring. Bird mist-netted under licence in Northamptonshire, UK. (© Lynne Barnett)

Press release: Europe risks a crisis if it fails to halt pollinator loss, researchers warn

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NOTE FROM JEFF: This press release came out at the start of the week and I am involved in two of the EU-funded projects that are mentioned, Butterfly and ProPollSoil, and I’m a co-author of the White Paper.

For immediate release

University of Bergen Brussels office, Rue Guimard 1040, Brussels, Belgium, 22 June 2026

Eight EU-funded research consortia warn that Europe risks a crisis if it fails to halt pollinator loss. Their solution: a roadmap to reverse wild pollinator decline and protect managed bees.

A new White Paper from eight major EU-funded pollinator projects warns that the resilience of Europe’s vital societal functions and food security are at stake if the EU fails to halt and reverse wild pollinator declines, and to support managed pollinators. Behind the report is an interdisciplinary team of 135 leading researchers with expertise ranging from ecosystem ecology, pollinator ecology, ecological economics, social science, environmental history, behavioural psychology, political science, and environmental law. The report flags the EU’s siloed governance structures and resulting policy incoherence as the major barrier to pollinator restoration. It states that the EU and its Member States urgently need to act by making Pollinator Stewardship an explicit and measurable top-priority across policies on agriculture, environment, chemicals, research and innovation, trade, finance, planning, legislation, and education.

The report diagnoses the looming pollinator crisis as arising from a dysfunctional relationship between humans and nature. Seeing humans as separate from and superior to nature, and thinking of nature as an object for human use as a resource, reinforces institutional structures that exploit nature for short-term individual and material gain. This leads to unsustainable agricultural practices that risk jeopardising the resilience of the ecosystems on which humanity critically depends.

There is more at stake than food security, the report warns. Indeed, many of Europe’s economic supply chains and sectors depend on pollination of flowering plants. Think of medicinal plants, food supplements, biomass energy crops, biomaterials, textiles, fodder, cosmetics, decoration, art, culture, and tourism.

The report also highlights the low pollinator literacy of key societal actors whose daily actions can make the difference for pollinators. It advocates mandating ecoliteracy in the education of professionals in all key sectors that affect pollinators and their habitats.

According to the report’s lead author, Professor Jeroen van der Sluijs, many people whose actions affect pollinators and their habitat are already doing their best to help save the bees. But most lack the literacy to understand how their practices cascade into pollinator loss.

“Many farmers plant wildflower strips along their fields, but almost no one knows that some moths are more effective pollinators than honeybees. These little creatures of the night, clothed in velvet and moonlit dust, need host plants for their larvae, not only flowers. Host plants for pollinating hoverflies, beetles and moths are missing in most seed-mixtures for flower strips.”

Avoiding a scenario in which Europe is hit by a pollination crisis requires addressing the EU’s functioning and moving away from its siloed governance structures. This requires addressing fragmented responsibilities across sectors, top-down policy design, and weak coordination among administrations that currently hinders effective pollinator restoration. According to the authors, the conflict between short-term production goals and the need to maintain pollination services as a public good must be solved as soon as possible.

The report ends with a detailed roadmap of 15 urgent, evidence-informed recommendations for action that, when fully implemented, can reverse pollinator decline in Europe.

Full White Paper: https://zenodo.org/records/20715669

When an old experiment revealed a new story about flowers

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Sometimes, science does not go the way you plan.

That is usually framed as failure: the experiment did not work, the results were inconclusive, the story was unclear. But science can also advance when we go back to old data and ask a different question. That is exactly what happened with a study of Field Scabious, Knautia arvensis, a familiar wildflower of meadows and grasslands.

Back in 2001, I carried out an experiment to test the function of the showy outer florets around the edge of the flower head. These enlarged “ray florets” look as though they ought to be important in attracting pollinators. The idea was simple: trim them in different ways and see whether pollinating insects responded – you can see the results of that trimming in the photo above.

The answer, at the time, was baffling. Bumblebees, hoverflies and butterflies (all of which are effective pollinators of this plant) did not seem to care very much. Visitation rates by the insects hardly changed, and neither did seed set. But seed weight did change, as did the amount of sugar being produced by the trimmed flower heads. At the time I could not make sense of this in relation to the question I had asked, so the data were archived and left alone.

But not forgotten.

Fast forward 25 years, and I was chatting about this data set with colleagues when I was at the Kunming Institute of Botany in China. That got me reading some more recent work about florivory -the damage done to flowers by animals – and I realised that this old experiment might make more sense if viewed from another angle. Perhaps I had not really been testing floral attraction at all. Perhaps, without intending to, I had carried out a simulated florivory experiment.

Seen in that light, the results became much more interesting.

Cutting the ray florets did not stop pollinators from visiting. Nor did it reduce the number of seeds produced. But it did change the plant’s internal economics. Nectar quality declined in the most heavily cut flowers, and the seeds that those flower heads produced were consistently lighter. In other words, the flowers still functioned well enough to get pollinated, but the plant appeared to invest less in rewards for pollinators and less in each of its offspring.

That matters because lighter seeds may have poorer prospects later in life, even if the plant initially appears to reproduce successfully. The damage did not cause total reproductive failure. Instead, it produced a subtler effect: hidden costs that only become visible when you look beyond simple seed counts.

Newly contexualised in this way, we wrote up this work, being completely honest about the history of the study, submitted it to the Journal of Pollination Ecology, where it received very positive reviews. It’s now been published and you can download a copy by following the link in the reference:

Ollerton, J., Xu, X. & Ren, Z.-X. (2026) Misconceived experiments may yield valuable insights: simulated florivory has unpredictable consequences for plant reproduction in Knautia arvensis (Caprifoliaceae). Journal of Pollination Ecology (in press)

I like this study because it tells two stories at once. One is ecological: florivory may not always reduce pollinator visits, but it can still alter plant reproduction in potentially important ways. The other is about how science actually works. Not every good paper begins with a perfect hypothesis and a clean result. Sometimes the value lies in returning to an awkward, neglected dataset and realising that it was trying to tell you something different all along.

Science does not always go the way you plan. But occasionally that is when it becomes most revealing.

Edible Apocynaceae: a new global synthesis of diversity, conservation and pollination just published – and a personal landmark for me!

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This year – 2026 – marks the 40th anniversary of my first publication. Forty years. Imagine that – I certainly can’t! It feels like a long time ago, a distant memory, another life. I was 21 and I hadn’t even begun my undergraduate degree. After a less-than-successful time at school I decided to complete a Higher National Diploma (HND) qualification in Applied Biology at Sunderland Polytechnic (now the University of Sunderland) that I hoped would get me a place on a degree course. As it turned out, it did, but during my HND I completed a research project which (with the encouragement of my then supervisor, the late cactus expert Geoff Swales*), was subsequently published in December 1986 as “Adaptation to arid environments in the Asclepiadaceae” in the British Cactus and Succulent Journal.

That was the modest start of a botanical love affair with asclepiads (now subsumed into the family Apocynaceae) that has persisted to this day and resulted in over 20 research papers, chapters, and more general articles, plus appearances in both of my books.

The latest of these papers is published today and, as well as being a 40 year milestone for me, it’s a paper that I am inordinately proud of, as it represents an amazing coalescence of ethnobotany, taxonomy, conservation, biogeography, cultural science, and pollination ecology. And I managed to sneak in a citation of the 1986 paper that started the whole thing!

This paper is the first global review of the diversity of edible species in a family that is usually considered to be highly toxic and produces a lot of sticky latex to deter herbivores. Yet that reputation turns out to be only part of the story. Our survey found no fewer than 440 edible species of Apocynaceae worldwide, which works out at about 7.7% of the family (and is definitely an under-estimate). They occur across all of the major evolutionary lineages of the family, and in most of the main biogeographic regions where these plants grow.

What people eat is also far more varied than you might expect. Fruits are the commonest edible part, but roots and tubers are also important, and in different places people consume leaves, stems, flowers, nectar, latex, bark and even wood ash used as a condiment. That diversity is not random: our analyses show clear phylogenetic and geographic patterning in which parts are eaten. In other words, both evolutionary history and regional cultural practices help to shape how Apocynaceae are used as food.

One especially interesting result is that edible Apocynaceae appear, on current evidence, to be less threatened than non-edible members of the family. But that comes with a big health warning: more than 80% of species, edible or otherwise, have never been properly assessed for conservation status. So there is still a huge amount that we do not know.

The same is true for pollination. Many of these plants depend on animal pollinators to produce the fruits and seeds that people eat, yet pollination data are missing for most edible species, including about 90% of those whose edible parts are directly pollinator-dependent.

For me, that is one of the most striking messages of the paper. Hidden inside a family best known for poisons and medicinal compounds is a substantial, globally distributed food resource, much of it tied to local knowledge and wild harvesting. It is a reminder that botanical and cultural diversity, conservation, and pollination ecology are all bound up together. And, as a nice bonus, the study even uncovered an unexpected taxonomic surprise in China, where one edible species turned out to belong in an entirely new genus, Kushengia. The edible flowers of Kushengia sinensis are shown in the image at the top of this post – lightly boiled, stir fried with garlic, and thoroughly delicious!

Here’s the reference with a link to the paper, which is unfortunately pay-walled. If anyone wants a copy, send me a request via my Contact page:

Ollerton, J., Albuquerque-Lima, S., Liede-Schumann, S., Galetto, L., Endress, M.E., Forster, P.I., Torres, C., Fishbein, M. & Ren, Z.X. (2026) Edible Apocynaceae: phylogeny, biogeography, conservation and pollination insights from a global synthesis. Taxon 75: e70131

*It goes without saying that I’m incredibly grateful to Geoff and the other teachers and supervisors who, during the course of my education, encouraged me in my studies. During one lab session with Geoff we were each given a cactus seed and asked to study it under a microscope and draw it. Afterwards I pocketed the seed, took it home, and germinated it. That cactus – a specimen of Parodia (Notocactus) mammulosus – is still growing on my windowsill, a living reminder of a great mentor.

Pollinator decline for legal professionals – a new article explains this complex and important issue

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Oxford University Press recently commissioned me to write a piece for their Expert Essentials series, which is designed to give legal professionals an overview of complex topics that increasingly affect their clients, their sectors, and the regulatory landscape in which they operate. My contribution, on pollinator decline, has now been published. That might seem an unusual topic for lawyers at first glance. Pollinators are usually framed as part of a conservation story: bees, butterflies, hoverflies, birds, bats and other animals that help flowering plants to reproduce. But as I argue in the article, pollinator decline is no longer just an ecological issue. It is becoming a legal, financial, and governance issue too.

Why should the legal profession care? Because pollinators sit right at the intersection of biodiversity loss, food security, business risk, and emerging regulation. Many of the crops that underpin global supply chains depend on animal pollination, especially fruits, nuts, oilseeds, coffee, and cocoa. If pollination services become less reliable, then yields can fall, costs can rise, and supply chains can become more fragile. That matters not only to farmers and food companies, but also to the lawyers advising businesses on disclosure, due diligence, liability, investment risk, and long-term resilience. As the article explains, pollinator decline has moved from being a “silent natural problem” to a boardroom issue with concrete legal hooks.

This shift is being driven in part by the rapid development of biodiversity-related reporting frameworks and regulatory expectations. Companies are increasingly expected to understand both how they depend upon nature and how they affect it. Pollinators are a particularly good example of this “double materiality”. A business may depend on pollinators for the crops and raw materials it sources, while also contributing to pollinator decline through land-use change, pesticide use, pollution, or habitat destruction. Under emerging sustainability and disclosure frameworks, that is no longer something that can be waved away as somebody else’s problem.

The legal implications are broad. They include advice on compliance with biodiversity reporting rules, contracts and due diligence across supply chains, litigation and liability relating to environmental harm, and the interpretation of new standards around nature-related risk. My article discusses frameworks such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and associated standards, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. Together, these are helping to pull biodiversity, including pollinators, out of the margins of environmental discussion and into mainstream conversations about governance, accountability, and fiduciary responsibility.

What makes this especially important for legal professionals and others is that pollinator decline is not caused by one simple factor. It is driven by a web of interacting pressures: habitat loss, agricultural intensification, pesticides, diseases, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. That complexity makes it difficult to regulate neatly, but also impossible to ignore. For lawyers, this is precisely the kind of scientifically complex, economically significant, and legally fast-moving issue that is becoming more common in the age of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting, biodiversity disclosure, and nature-related financial risk.

In other words, this is not about turning lawyers into ecologists. It is about ensuring that legal professionals understand enough of the science to advise clients intelligently in a world where biodiversity loss is becoming embedded in regulation, reporting, corporate strategy, and litigation. Pollinators may be small, but the consequences of losing them are anything but.

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

Ollerton, J. (2026) Pollinator decline: a global issue with social, legal, and economic implications. In: Kimutai, J. & O’Donovan, C. (eds), Environmental Science; in De Silva, S. et al. (eds), Expert Essentials (Oxford, online edn, Oxford Law Pro) https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198972877.003.0080.

Here’s the abstract:

This article aims to equip legal professionals with an understanding of pollinator decline, why this is important to business and finance, and the relevant emerging standards and regulatory frameworks. Pollinators – including insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals – are essential to the reproduction of most flowering plants and underpin global food production, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. Global evidence shows that many pollinator populations are declining, raising concerns that extend well beyond conservation into agriculture, business, and the economy. These declines are driven by multiple interacting pressures, including habitat loss, intensive land use, pesticide exposure, parasites and diseases, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. No single factor is responsible, and responses must therefore be systemic. Pollinators support the yields and quality of many food crops, particularly fruits, nuts, and seeds that are central to human nutrition, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars annually to global agricultural output. Yet pollinators are often overlooked in risk assessments, despite growing evidence that their decline can disrupt supply chains, increase production costs, and weaken ecosystem services. Monitoring data reveal mixed but troubling trends, though data gaps remain substantial, complicating assessment and response. Regardless of uncertainties, pollinator decline is increasingly relevant to law and governance. Emerging global and regional frameworks – including biodiversity targets, sustainability reporting standards, and nature-related disclosure initiatives – are bringing pollinators into corporate reporting, due diligence, and liability discussions. As a result, pollinators are no longer solely an ecological concern, but a material issue for businesses, investors, and legal professionals navigating sustainability, disclosure, and long-term risk.

Join me for two webinars exploring the links between biodiversity, pollinators and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

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The diversity of life on Earth, and the interactions between the species that make up that diversity, are fundamentally important to the functioning of ecosystems and to human well-being. Yet these connections are often poorly appreciated, despite the fact that biodiversity supports everything from food production and clean water to climate resilience and human health.

At the end of March and the end of May I will be presenting two lunchtime webinars which explore this as part of the Biological Recording Company’s Skills for Ecology series. These talks will look at how biodiversity in general, and plant–pollinator interactions in particular, connect to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), showing why the conservation of nature is central to a just, healthy, and sustainable future.

Here are the dates and the links for booking:

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

Join me on 26th February in Leicester for a talk: “Adventures in Pollination!”

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On Thursday 26th February I’m giving a talk to the Friends of the University of Leicester Botanic Garden with the title that you see above.

The talk starts at 7.30pm and non-members are welcome to attend, for a donation of £2 (which sounds like a bargain to me!) I’ll also have copies of my books Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society and Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship for sale.

More details can be found here:

https://le.ac.uk/botanic-garden/friends-of-the-garden

I hope to see some of you there!

As you might have guessed, the image above was generated by my personal tool with collaborator-like affordances – blame it for any biogeographical errors!

Pollination as a matter of national security

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In these turbulent times it’s hard to know where to focus one’s gaze. Do we concentrate on Ukraine? Greenland? Venezuela? Sudan? China? Russia? The Middle East? The rise of the far right and religious fundamentalism? Cyber security? Global organised crime? If it’s confusing and worrying for the average person, imagine what it’s like for national security services who are charged with assessing and responding to such threats.

It is increasingly recognised that national security in the 21st century extends beyond military threats to encompass food systems, economic resilience, public health, and the stability of critical ecological infrastructure. Which is why it’s no surprise to learn that the UK’s national security organisations – MI5 and MI6 – have just released a report titled Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: A national security assessment.

The report has been covered by The Guardian under the heading “Biodiversity collapse threatens UK security, intelligence chiefs warn” and the article begins:

The global attack on nature is threatening the UK’s national security, government intelligence chiefs have warned, as the increasingly likely collapse of vitally important natural systems would bring mass migration, food shortages and price rises, and global disorder.

This framing explicitly treats biodiversity loss not as an environmental side issue, but as a systemic risk multiplier capable of amplifying existing geopolitical, economic, and social stresses. I have emboldened two words in that quote in order to emphasise that this report is very much about the state of the world, not just the state of my home country. In an interconnected global food and trade system, ecological collapse in one region rapidly propagates elsewhere through markets, migration, and political instability. What happens globally has implications locally; not just food security from imports, but “geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources”, to quote the report.

Where does pollination fit into this? As far as I know, pollination has never been singled out in security analyses, yet it underpins many of the very food systems, rural economies, and ecosystem functions upon which national resilience depends. In my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society I mention “food security” about ten times, as I firmly believe that loss of pollinators is a serious issue to food supply chains. The report similarly states that:

UK food production is vulnerable to ecosystem degradation and collapse. Biodiversity loss, alongside climate change, is amongst the biggest medium to long term threat to domestic food production – through depleted soils, loss of pollinators, drought and flood conditions.

But I would go further and state that loss of pollination by insects and vertebrates poses a national security threat that extends far beyond just their role in food production.

Let me explain why I believe this.

The Global biodiversity loss report focuses on six different parts of the world (and seven ecosystems) that it considers “critical ecosystems…at risk of collapsing”. One of those areas – the coral reefs of Southeast Asia – is not directly dependent upon pollinators to support its long-term functioning. Two areas – the boreal forests of Canada and Russia – are dominated mainly (though not exclusively) by wind-pollinated trees, such as conifers and birches. The other four ecosystems, however, have a dependence on pollinators that ranges from significant to enormous. These are the Mangroves of Southeast Asia and the Himalayas (both significant) and the Amazon Rainforest and Congo Basin (both enormous).

What do I mean here by words like “significant” and “enormous”? What is my measure? What I mean is the number and proportion of flowering plants—particularly dominant species, often trees—that underpin most ecosystem functions, such as photosynthesis and carbon storage, and that rely to some extent on pollinators to reproduce.

In high elevation areas such as the Himalayas, I know from experience that it’s common for there to be a mixture of wind and animal pollinated species in communities. Similarly, mangrove species include some which are wind pollinated – see this review for example. In other words, the long-term population stability of Himalayan woodland and Southeast Asian mangrove forests is, in large part, dependent on the pollinators that those ecosystems support. If those pollinators were lost, in the long term (decades to centuries) wind-pollinated trees would dominate and biodiversity would significantly decline.

The situation in the forests of tropical South America and west Africa is rather different. Not only is there a much greater diversity of plant species in these ecosystems, but in these largely rainforest regions, often all of them are animal pollinated, as we showed in this paper and which is reflected in the graph above, which comes from my book. Lose the pollinators and we lose the long-term viability of ecosystems that provide regionally- and globally-vital functions.

Ultimately, if we are to protect pollinator communities, and the ecosystem functions and services they provide, we need to take their conservation more seriously than we do at the moment. Framed this way, pollinator conservation becomes a form of preventive security investment, analogous to maintaining flood defences or safeguarding energy and cyber infrastructure. The European Union’s Pollinator Initiative and the projects that it supports, including Butterfly and ProPollSoil in which I’m involved, is a good example. Likewise, there are policy movements appearing in China, as I recently reported. But biodiversity conservation is a global issue, as the security services report makes clear, and that applies to pollinators.

There will no doubt be sceptics out there who think that I am over-playing the importance of pollinators and pollination. That’s fine, it’s good to have these debates. Pollination is not a national security issue in the narrow, traditional sense of defence against hostile actors. But in the 21st-century security landscape, where threats are systemic, slow-burning, and ecologically grounded, pollination loss clearly qualifies as a strategic risk to national stability and resilience.

In that respect, I believe that the question is not whether pollination is a national security issue—but whether national security thinking has yet fully adapted to the biological foundations on which societies depend.

Connecting soils and pollinators: the ProPollSoil project kicks off in Germany!

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The ProPollSoil project officially got underway on 1st October, and this week (16th–20th November) our consortium gathered in Freising, Germany, for the kick-off meeting hosted by the Technical University of Munich. It was an inspiring start: dozens of experts from across Europe coming together to explore two big questions: How does the health of our soils shape the fate of pollinators? And how do pollinators influence soil health?

Most people think of pollination as something that happens in the air or on flowers, but for many species the story begins underground. Thousands of bees, hoverflies, beetles and wasps depend on soil to nest, overwinter, or complete parts of their life cycle. For example, around half of the solitary bee species in Britain and Ireland are what we term “ground nesting” and make their nests in different types of soil. Yet soil conditions—structure, temperature, contaminants, farming practices—are changing rapidly. As part of the EU’s Mission Soil programme, ProPollSoil aims to understand these hidden links so we can better protect the pollinators that support our food systems and ecosystems.

The project brings together specialists in entomology, soil science, ecology, modelling, agriculture, economics, and communication, forming a truly interdisciplinary team. Through desk-based reviews, fieldwork, lab experiments, monitoring and advanced modelling techniques, we’ll be investigating how soil influences pollinator survival and what we can do to improve it.

ProPollSoil is built around six key goals, including identifying the soil conditions that help pollinators thrive, testing innovative ways to monitor soil-dependent species, evaluating how different land-use and farming practices affect pollinators, and developing practical soil-management solutions—from reduced tillage to cleaner soils—that can slow or reverse their decline.

My own role mainly focuses on understanding the state of our current knowledge of the biology and ecology of soil-dependent pollinators and their interactions with soils, other invertebrates, and plants. I’ll also be working on integrating information about pollinators’ soil dependencies into the European Atlas of Plant-Pollinator Associations (EuroAPPA), part of the related Butterfly Project, whose kick-off meeting I documented on the blog earlier this year.

Together, these efforts will help build a clearer, more complete understanding of how life belowground supports life aboveground. It’s an exciting journey, and we’re only just getting started!

My sincere thanks to all of the ProPollSoil consortium members whose passion and expertise made for a stimulating few days in Germany. And a special shout-out for the team from Poland who brought with them some delicious, PropPollSoil branded sweets: