Tag Archives: Biodiversity

Bumblebee Pollen Citizen Science Project – get involved!

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are calling for volunteers to contribute to their investigation of the springtime pollen diets of bumblebees in the UK countryside.

Spring is a critical season for colony-establishing bumblebees, but little is known about what types of pollen they collect at this time. In particular, trees, shrubs, and woodland flowers may make significant contributions to bumblebee pollen diets.

Volunteers are needed from across the UK to collect pollen samples from live bumblebees in April and May this year. These will then be analysed by the researchers to determine their taxonomic composition.

Volunteers can collect as many or as few samples as they like – every contribution will help! For an information pack detailing what is involved, and to receive a registration form, please email Guthrie Allen (BIO – Postgraduate Researcher): G.Allen [at] uea.ac.uk.

The flower that’s pollinated by birds, bees….and the wind!

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In my new book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship I spend a bit of time discussing the idea of the bird pollination syndrome that we refer to as ‘ornithophily’, its limitations, and the fact that it has two distinct meanings that are often conflated. One of the problems with ornithophily, and indeed all of the syndromes, is that historically it’s sometimes blinkered scientists to the extent that they only look at the flower visitors that are “right” for the syndrome, ignoring the rest or dismissing them as “secondary pollinators”, a term I dislike.

Why do I dislike that term? Because it fails to capture the complexity of flower-pollinator interactions and relegates an important component of plant reproduction to a subsidiary role. I could go on about this at some length, but if you’re interested in discovering more, look at pages 62-65 of Birds & Flowers. There I contrast the classical Most Effective Pollinator Principle with the equally valid (but much less well studied) Least Effective Pollinator Principle, with a segue into one of my favourite tracks from Led Zeppelin’s second album: What is and What Should Never Be.

But back to the real subject of this post – a flower that corresponds to the classical bird pollination syndrome BUT is also pollinated by bees and (very surprisingly) wind! It’s such an interesting paper by Brazilian ecologists Amanda Pacheco, Pedro Bergamo & Leandro Freitas – here’s the reference and a link to the study:

Pacheco, A., Bergamo, P.J. & Freitas, L. (2024) An unexpected case of wind pollination: ambophily in an ornithophilous tropical mountaintop Orobanchaceae. Plant Systematics and Evolution 310, 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-024-01890-6

For over 100 years the classical pollination syndromes have acted as a framework for understanding the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator interactions. But we’ve long known that while they can be a useful shorthand, they do not fully reflect the complexity of how pollination systems evolve. That shouldn’t surprise us because, as I point out in my two recent books, we have data (of any quality) on no more than 10% of the 350,000 or so species of flowering plants!

In addition, those plants for which we do have good data are NOT a random subset of the flowering plants: they have been specifically chosen by researchers because they look to be good systems with which to address particular ecological or evolutionary questions.

Which is fine, but we MUST recognise that this imposes significant restrictions on our understanding of the biodiversity of plant-pollinator interactions. The authors of this paper expressed it very well when they wrote that assumptions about:

“predictability may cause researchers to take for granted that only birds pollinate ornithophilous flowers, hindering research on the contribution of other vectors.”

To which I’d add: it also hinders our understanding of how these interactions evolve over long time scales and across multiple populations.

An obvious question is: how frequent are these sorts of complex pollination systems, involving different pollen vectors of an apparently specialised flower? The answer is that we simply don’t know, because most researchers would have not gone into this level of detail. So a huge congratulations to the authors for a great study – I hope it stimulates others to look beyond the ‘expected’ pollinators of flowers.

Photos: Nathália Susin Streher from the original paper.

Key tropical crops at risk from pollinator loss due to climate change and land use – a new study just published

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PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) is one of the most important sources of data for large-scale modelling of how changes in land use is impacting biodiversity. Marry that with future climate models and you have a powerful tool for understanding how these two major factors in global change will shape both biodiversity and human society over the coming decades.

In recent years it’s been a privilege to be part of a project led by Joe Millard and Tim Newbold that’s using PREDICTS to model how pollinators and pollination services are likely to be impacted by human activities. The first paper from that work (which was Joe’s PhD) was entitled ‘Global effects of land-use intensity on local pollinator biodiversity’ and came out in 2021, as I documented on my blog at the time.

Yesterday a second paper was published, this time focused on how land use and anthropogenic climate change interact to potentially affect insect-pollinated crops across the world.

Our main finding is that it’s tropical crops, especially cocoa, mango, watermelon, and coffee, that in the future will suffer the greatest negative impacts from loss of pollinators. Although we can have perfectly healthy diets without consuming any of those, they currently support tens of millions of farmers across the tropics and are part of global supply chains worth billions of dollars per year.

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

Millard, J., Outhwaite, C.L., Ceaușu, S., Luísa G. Carvalheiro, da Silva e Silva, F.D., Dicks, L.V., Ollerton, J. & Newbold, T. (2023) Key tropical crops at risk from pollinator loss due to climate change and land use. Science Advances 9, eadh0756

Here’s the abstract:

Insect pollinator biodiversity is changing rapidly, with potential consequences for the provision of crop pollination. However, the role of land use–climate interactions in pollinator biodiversity changes, as well as consequent economic effects via changes in crop pollination, remains poorly understood. We present a global assessment of the interactive effects of climate change and land use on pollinator abundance and richness and predictions of the risk to crop pollination from the inferred changes. Using a dataset containing 2673 sites and 3080 insect pollinator species, we show that the interactive combination of agriculture and climate change is associated with large reductions in insect pollinators. As a result, it is expected that the tropics will experience the greatest risk to crop production from pollinator losses. Localized risk is highest and predicted to increase most rapidly, in regions of sub-Saharan Africa, northern South America, and Southeast Asia. Via pollinator loss alone, climate change and agricultural land use could be a risk to human well-being.

Insect pollination in deep time – a new review just published

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As a teenager one of my main interests was collecting fossils. In search of specimens I wandered for hours, scouring the Carboniferous coal shale heaps and Permian reef outcrops of my native Sunderland. I spent so much time bothering the geology curator at the local museum with my inquiries that he offered to host me for a year as the placement part of my college course. If I had been able to convince my tutors that paleontology was really just biology in deep time I may have ended up as a professional fossil researcher. But it was not to be and instead I spent a (mostly happy) year working in the microbiology laboratory of a local brewery.

My interest in the ecology of the past has never left me, and over the years I’ve contributed a few articles to journals commenting on the latest fossil findings as they relate to pollination and flowering plant evolution. So I was delighted to be asked by Spanish paleontologist David Peris to help with a new review of insect pollination in deep time, led by PhD candidate Constanza Peña-Kairath. That review has just been published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and for the next 50 days it’s available for free download by following the link in the reference:

Peña-Kairath, C., Delclòs, X., Álvarez-Parra, S., Peñalver, E., Engel, M.S., Ollerton, J. & Peris, D. (2023) Insect pollination in deep time. Trends in Ecology & Evolution (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Inferring insect pollination from compression fossils and amber inclusions is difficult because of a lack of consensus on defining an insect pollinator and the challenge of recognizing this ecological relationship in deep time. We propose a conceptual definition for such insects and an operational classification into pollinator or presumed pollinator. Using this approach, we identified 15 insect families that include fossil pollinators and show that pollination relationships have existed since at least the Upper Jurassic (~163 Ma). Insects prior to this can only be classified as presumed pollinators. This gives a more nuanced insight into the origin and evolution of an ecological relationship that is vital to the establishment, composition and conservation of modern terrestrial ecosystems.

Plant-pollinator meta-network of the Kashmir Himalaya: a new study just published

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Although we sometimes like to think that we have a “global” perspective on plant-pollinator interactions, in truth there are large parts of the world where we have little or no information. That’s especially true of biodiversity hotspots. One such hotspot is the Kashmir Himalaya, a relatively small area (just 135 km long by 32 km wide) that nonetheless contains an estimated 2,000 species of flowering plant, more than 150 of which are endemic to the area. In addition, over 1,280 insect pollinator species have been described, including at least 29 species of bumblebees and as many as 40 species of butterflies.

Recently I’ve been collaborating with Dr Zubair Rather from the University of Kashmir and his colleagues on a data set that represents the first network analysis of plant-pollinator interactions from the region. The network is presented at a large spatial scale – what is often termed a “meta-network”. As Dr Kit Prendergast and I noted in our recent paper, scale matters when it comes to analysing these sorts of networks. Nonetheless (to quote the current paper):

“meta-networks represent the “backbone” of plant-pollinator interactions to which smaller, local networks are attached”

Even at this very large scale we’re seeing some fascinating patterns emerging with respect to the plants, for example the importance of cultivated apples in supporting the wider network of flower visitors. Also notable, and I believe demonstrated for the first time, is the fact that both the indigenous Asian Honeybee (Apis cerana) and the introduced Western Honeybee (A. mellifera) utilise exactly the same, extremely broad array of plants from which to collect nectar and pollen.

Our Kashmir meta-network is, hopefully, the starting point for further work on plant-pollinator interactions in this fascinating and diverse part of the world. The paper is published in a special issue of the journal Flora that’s dedicated to the importance of natural history when considering the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator relationships. The special issue is a celebration of the work of Professor Marlies Sazima and is edited by Dr Pedro Bergamo.

Here’s the reference with a link to download a free copy which should be valid up to and including 23rd January 2023:

Rather, Z.A, Ollerton, J., Parey, S.H., Ara, S., Watts, S., Paray, M.M & Khuroo, A.A. (2022) Plant-pollinator meta-network of the Kashmir Himalaya: structure, modularity, integration of alien species and extinction simulation. Flora (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Plant-pollinator studies are increasingly using network analysis to investigate the structure and function of such communities. However, many areas of high biodiversity largely remain unexplored in this way. Our study describes a plant-pollinator meta-network from an understudied biodiversity hotspot, the Kashmir Himalaya, where we specifically investigate plant-pollinator network nestedness and modularity, as well as the influence of alien species and the impacts of simulating species extinctions on network structure. Natural history observations were used to document the meta-network between 230 plant and 80 pollinator species forming 1958 (11% of the possible) interactions. Among the plants Malus domestica and among the pollinators Apis mellifera and A. cerana formed the largest number of interactions with significant influence over the whole network. Network cumulative degree distribution depicted a higher number of degree levels in pollinators than plants. A moderately high number of realized interactions were revealed, thereby indicating potential structural and functional stability in the network. Eight strongly defined modules were observed in the network which varied in their composition. For example, the Ephedra module exclusively comprised of native species whereas the Apis module comprised of all the four different types of interacting species (i.e. native and alien plants and pollinators) and also integrated the highest number of alien species. In the network overall, 40% of interactions were by alien species, reflecting how well these were integrated. Extinction simulations suggested that the network would collapse more quickly when the most connected pollinators are removed, rather than the most connected plant species. Our study is the first assessment of a plant-pollinator network from this Himalayan biodiversity hotspot; and will help to inform the ecological and economic implications of plant-pollinator interactions in an era of global biodiversity crisis.

Food system resilience: concepts, issues and challenges – a new, open access review just published

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Human populations across the planet are locked into complex economic, agricultural, social, political and ecological systems that provide them with food or, under extreme circumstances, fail to provide that sustenance. The complexity of these food systems requires that they are studied from a multi-disciplinary perspective because no one subject, or individual, can possibly do justice to this crucial topic.

One of the most pressing questions related to food systems is how we ensure that they are resilient to the current and future challenges of war, pandemics, climate change, economic shocks, biodiversity loss (including pollinators, of course), and a host of other factors. Some of these are predictable, others are not, except that recent and distant history tells us that such challenges are always going to be a feature of our societies and we need to prepare as best we can. This review of our current understanding of resilience in food systems is therefore timely and important.

My involvement with this review stems from the work I did with with Simon Potts and Tom Breeze at the University of Reading, Helen Lomax (University of Huddersfield) and Jim Rouquette (Natural Capital Solutions) on a project called Modelling landscapes for resilient pollination services in the UK (funded by BBSRC 2017-2020). That project, in turn, was part of a much larger funding programme entitled Resilience of the UK Food System in a Global Context. You can expect to see more publications coming from this research in the future.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the open access paper:

Zurek, M., Ingram, J., Bellamy, A.S., Goold, C., Lyon, C., Alexander, P., Barnes, A., Bebber, D.P., Breeze, T.D, Bruce, A., Collins, L.M., Davies, J. Doherty, B., Ensor, J., Franco, S.C., Gatto, A., Hess, T., Lamprinopoulou, C., Liu, L., Merkle, M., Norton, L., Oliver, T., Ollerton, J., Potts, S., Reed, M.S., Sutcliffe, C. & Withers, P.J.A. (2022) Food system resilience: concepts, issues and challenges. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 47: 22.1–22.24 doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-112320-050744

Here’s the abstract:

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation—the three “Rs”). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors’ perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future.

Deforestation grabs the headlines: but what about the grasslands?

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Perhaps it’s because we don’t have a fancy name for it? “Deforestation” rolls off the tongue in a rather satisfying way that emphasises the importance of conserving old growth and ancient woodlands. But how do we describe destruction of grasslands? “Degrasslandation” doesn’t really work, even though at its root is trying to describe the same effect: the loss of important, carbon-storing and biodiversity-preserving ecosystems. Grasslands, remember, are the world’s largest single terrestrial ecosystem.

Of course it’s not just grasslands that are disappearing: shrublands and savannahs such as the Brazilian cerrado are being lost even faster than forests are being cut down. But again “deshrublandisation” or “decerradoisation” just don’t have the same ring. Nor the political clout: Boris Johnson cannot wax lyrical about the “cathedrals of nature” of chalk grassland on Salisbury Plain or the species rich flood meadows along the Thames. However Britain has lost far more of them than we have of ancient woodlands: over 90% of such species diverse grasslands have now gone according to some estimates.

It’s clear that forests have great PR, are highly photogenic, and are ecologically incredibly important. So today’s announcement at COP26 that world leaders have committed to stopping deforestation by 2030 is welcome news: if they come through with their promises, which they didn’t following a similar announcement in 2014. But I’m in agreement with Gill Perkins who has just published this opinion piece in New Scientist. A commitment to stop grasslands, and other types of habitat, being built on, ploughed up or agriculturally “improved” could go a long way towards ensuring that carbon remains locked up in the world’s soils and vegetation. It doesn’t all have to be about the forests.

UPDATE: for more about the importance of grasslands and how they are being degraded worldwide, see this recent piece by Richard Bardgett, James Bullock, and colleagues entitled “Combatting global grassland degradation“.

For World Bee Day 2021: an update of the coffee-bee visits figure from my book

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Today is World Bee Day 2021! To celebrate it, here’s an update of a figure that appears in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. It’s reminder of just how important bees are as the main pollinators of coffee, one of the world’s major crops. The new figure adds another two years of data and also improves the accuracy of some of the statistics for the previous decade. The coffee production data are from the International Coffee Organization.

Bottom line is that the global coffee production in 2019/20 was the result of 24 TRILLION flower visits by bees! That’s down a little from the previous year, but it’s still a LOT of visits by a HELL of a lot bees!

If you want to know more about how this was calculated and what it means for both coffee production and bee conservation, I discuss it with Dr Kirsten Traynor in this recent podcast for the magazine 2 Million Blossoms.

Happy World Bee Day everyone!

Protecting British Pollinators event TOMORROW – 25th March

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I meant to post about this earlier but it’s been a really busy few weeks, so apologies if this is late in the day for any of you. Tomorrow morning there’s a webinar being run by the Public Policy Exchange entitled: “Protecting British Pollinators”. There’s an interesting set of speakers and I’ve been asked to provide the opening introduction and to chair the event.

Here’s the link for more details and booking information:

https://www.publicpolicyexchange.co.uk/event.php?eventUID=LC25-PPE

It should be a good meeting, hope to see some of you there.

Neither left nor right, but international environmentalism: Australia reflections part 8

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2020-01-13 12.17.33

The NASA Earth Observatory reported this week that “explosive fire activity” has caused smoke from the Australian bushfires to enter the stratosphere and be carried half way around the world. That smoke is currently creating hazy skies and colourful sunrises and sunsets across South America. In the coming months the smoke will complete a full circuit and arrive back in Australia, and then continue onwards … for who knows how long?

Nothing I’ve read this week sums up better the fact that the world’s environmental challenges, including climate change, are global in scale and scope. They therefore require global initiatives to solve. But as I’ll argue below, equating “green” politics with the left and “anti-environmental” policies with the right is an unhelpful characterisation.

Despite the need for global action, the world’s political landscape seems to be going in the opposite direction. Inward-looking, right-wing populism is on the rise, and governments are hunkering down into a siege mentality of denying that there are any environmental problems that require serious, long-term action. The Australian government, bolstered by the Murdoch-owned media empire (see Michael Mann’s recent piece on this in Newsweek), sees the bushfire crisis as “business as usual” even though all the evidence is to the contrary – demonstrated in this interesting piece from two Australian climate scientists.

Elsewhere in the world, Presidents Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump in the USA are tearing up environmental regulations and “green tape” and allowing “the people” (or at least big business interests) to ransack the natural world for their own gain. At the same time, one of the less-well-reported elements of Boris Johnson’s various speeches over the past few months has been its emphasis on the environment (he even used the word “biodiversity” in one of them) and the pressure he put on the other leaders of the G7 countries at their most recent meeting. Perhaps that should come as no surprise given that Boris’s father, former Conservative MEP Stanley Johnson, has sound credentials as an environmentalist, particularly during his time with the European Commission. Indeed, in the mid 1980s Stanley Johnson received an award from Greenpeace for “Outstanding Services to the Environment”. He’s even written for The Guardian, which is not the natural home for a member of the Conservative party. There are other Conservatives with sincere pro-environmental attitudes (Zac Goldsmith and Rory Stewart come immediately to mind) and whatever you may think about their views on other topics, you can’t doubt their sincere environmental commitments. And of course there are pro-environmental politicians in the Labour Party, and the Liberals and the SNP and Plaid Cymru and…..well, just about all of them.

Globally, both right- and left-governed states have variable environmental policies. Two countries recently reported that they had made extraordinary progress in tree planting restoration schemes: India (a right-wing, populist government) and Ethiopia (much more left-leaning). China (communist in name but who knows what we should call it?) has a very mixed record on the environment, with huge investments in both solar power and coal mining. It’s hard to get firm environmental data out of communist North Korea but the evidence so far suggests that they are not doing well: see this piece from 2009 by journalist Peter Hayes.

Closer to home, in the last few months on Twitter I’ve been called an “eco-loony” by a farmer; told that my objections to the High Speed 2 (HS2) rail infrastructure project were providing support for climate change deniers by a couple of train buffs; and accused of “sleeping with the enemy” by an environmental activist who didn’t like my stance on another large project. The latter also tweeted a made-up quote from me to emphasise just how morally corrupt I was. Irony was lost on them I think. I don’t know the political allegiances of those individuals but if I was a betting man I’d be fairly sure of a good return – definitely a mix across the spectrum.

Hopefully these examples make something abundantly clear: the relationship between politics and environmentalism is not straightforward. That’s been obvious to me, and many others, for a long time. But I’m not sure how widely understood this is because the impression that is presented to the public by both the right- and left-leaning media, is that “green equals left”. And whilst there may be some truth to that currently in relation to the political alliances formed between various Green Parties, there is no historical basis for this correlation. It’s even mixed up in the minds of the modern-day socialists. A few months ago a left-wing journalist opined that the left had “always” been pro-environmental, yet the (supposedly) socialist website Spiked has been publishing pieces arguing that environmentalists are against the working class and that de-carbonisation strategies will cost jobs – see this piece for instance. Before anyone comments, I’m aware that Spiked has an odd and paradoxical history…..

Historically, both the far left and the far right have a mixed track record on the environment. I read an appalling story recently about the Soviet Union whaling fleet killing whales simply to meet targets, not because they were of value economically; the author described it as “the most senseless environmental crime of the 20th century“. However, communist Cuba set aside 10% of its area as national parks and biosphere reserves, and has a strong environmental track record. In the 1950s, Maoist China had a policy of killing sparrows and other “pests” that was partly the cause of the Great Chinese Famine in which tens of millions of people died of starvation. The first National Parks in the world were set up in the USA by what we could broadly consider conservative presidents, but the American legacy of nuclear testing and the fossil fuel industry is nothing to be proud of. Finally, there is a long history of “green” fascism, from the environmental policies of the Nazis (I’ve not read this book but it looks fascinating), to individuals such as Jorian Jenks who was a founding member of the Soil Association, to modern day “eco-fascists” whose justification for carrying out mass-murder and domestic terrorism is rooted in arguments about reducing population growth in order to “save the Earth”.

It’s telling that Big Capitalism is starting to think more seriously about global environmental problems, how they can be solved, and at the same time create jobs and prosperity (and a buck or two for investors – I’m not naive). Outgoing head of the Bank of England Mark Carney has argued that firms and banks need to stop investing in fossil-fuels. Many are following his lead, or are ahead of that curve, including the bank Goldman Sachs and the $7 trillion investment firm BlackRock which has recently stated that “climate change will become the centre of the firm’s investment strategy“. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has argued this week that Australia is showing us “the road to hell” and that governments and businesses of all political stripes and inclination better get on board with the environmental agenda. Soon!

I firmly believe that neither the left nor the right are the friend nor the foe of environmentalism: there are plenty of historical and current examples of rapacious right-wing and left-wing governments, and also examples of such governments being highly pro-active at reducing their country’s environmental impact. The one thing that seems to me to be environmentally damaging is a rigid ideology that is followed through regardless of where it is positioned.

The title of this piece is a word play on a slogan adopted by the Socialist Workers Party: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”. The environmental challenges facing our planet, our species, and the species with which we share this biosphere, are international in scope and it requires international, multi-partisan political action to address. Whatever your personal political leanings, if you care about the planet, that statement must be blindingly obvious. That’s why I’m so supportive of organisations like the UN’s IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). Now, more than ever, the world needs this level of pan-national leadership.

If I’ve learned one thing as an ecologist it’s that the world is a complex, historically contingent and often unpredictable place: simplistic notions of socialism = good/bad and capitalism = good/bad are not going to solve the current crisis of climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and a host of other environmental problems. Only thinking outside of narrow ideologies is going to do that, and using the tools and strategies that are available to us, including market forces, open democracy, local activism, global movements, and whatever else works. I’m still optimistic that the world can provide humanity with the kind of metaphorical “pleasant walks” that Charles Darwin wrote about when he visited the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney:

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But we have to act fast. Otherwise the ruins of civilization, and of the biosphere, may be our species’ legacy: that’s why I chose the image that opens this piece.