The nice people at NHBS recently did a wide-ranging interview with me about my new book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society and what led me to write it. It covers a lot of ground, including climate change, food security, the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, and growing up in Sunderland.
Here’s the link:
https://www.nhbs.com/blog/jeff-ollerton-pollinators-pollination
As I write a slow haze of fine snow is falling, covering our garden with a thin white dusting. Spring feels a long way off, despite the emerging spears of daffodil leaves. But you can get a taste of what the new season will bring by signing up for a short series of free evening online talks on the topic of pollinators that has been organised by the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust – here’s the link for the Bee Together programme – and here’s more details of the talks:
Thursday January 28 at 7pm: Pollinators and Pollination: Nature and Society
An overview of the diversity of pollinators in Britain, why they are important, and the threats to that diversity with Jeff Ollerton.
Thursday February 18 (7pm): The B-Lines Project
Buglife’s B-Lines network is an imaginative solution to the problem of the loss of flowers and pollinators. B-Lines are a series of ‘insect pathways’ running through our countryside and towns, along which Buglife are restoring and creating a series of wildflower-rich habitat stepping stones. Catherine Jones talks about mapping the recently completed B-Lines map and some of the projects that have already created habitat for pollinators.
Thursday February 25 (7pm): The Hidden Lives of Garden Bees
Brigit Strawbridge Howard will explain some of the basic differences between bumblebees, solitary bees, and honeybees – including lifecycles and nesting behaviour; the problems they all face; and, most important, what we can do to help. Brigit is a wildlife gardener, amateur naturalist and advocate of bees. She writes and campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of native wild bees, and is the author of Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature.
I hope to see some of you there: Happy New Year everyone!
Yesterday I was delighted to finally receive an advance copy of my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society! It’s been over three years in the writing and production, much longer than I had anticipated. But, as I describe in its pages, the book is the culmination of >50 years of experience, study and research. So perhaps three years isn’t so bad…
If you’re interested in buying a copy you can order it direct from Pelagic Publishing and from most of the large online booksellers. Let me know what you think.
A few people have asked me about what’s covered in my book which is being published by Pelagic and is currently in production. Here’s the chapter titles:
Preface
1 The importance of pollinators and pollination
2 More than just bees: the diversity of pollinators
3 To be a flower
4 Fidelity and promiscuity in Darwin’s entangled bank
5 The evolution of pollination strategies
6 A matter of time: from daily cycles to climate change
7 Agricultural perspectives
8 Urban environments
9 The significance of gardens
10 The shifting fates of pollinators
11 New bees on the block
12 Managing, restoring and connecting habitats
13 The politics of pollination
14 Studying pollinators and pollination
As you can see it’s a very wide-ranging overview of the subject, and written to be accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike. To quote what I wrote in the Preface:
“While the book is aimed at a very broad audience, and is intended to be comprehensible to anyone with an interest in science and the environment, and their intersection with human societies, I hope it will also be of interest to those dealing professionally with plants and pollinators. The subject is vast, and those working on bee or hoverfly biology, for example, or plant reproductive ecology, may learn something new about topics adjacent to their specialisms. I certainly learned a lot from writing the book.”
The book is about 100,000 words in length, lots of illustrations, and there will be an index. My copy editor reckons there’s 450 references cited, though I haven’t counted. I do know that they run to 28 pages in the manuscript, and that’s with 11pt text. All going well it will be published before Christmas.
There’s been much discussion in the news and online recently about seed collecting, habitat restoration, and tree planting as a way of storing carbon in an effort to reduce the effects of climate change. This is one of the (many) elements proposed by the recent Drawdown Framework. In fact their “Table of Solutions” ranks tropical forest restoration in the top 5 to 10 ways of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere, and temperate forest restoration and planting in the top 20.
At one end of the spatial scale, Markus Eichhorn relates the story of his father’s obsession with collecting oak seedlings to reforest the local countryside. At the other, there’s some very high profile forest restoration schemes going on at the moment; here’s a couple that immediately come to mind:
Grain for Green – China’s attempt to restore vegetation to abandoned farmland to reduce soil erosion and flooding. According to the Wikipedia entry “Grain for Green has involved 124 million people in 1,897 counties in 25 provinces……. By 2010, around 15 million hectares of farmland and 17 million hectares of barren mountainous wasteland were converted back to natural vegetation”.
Great Green Wall – a multinational initiative in Africa aimed at restoring the vegetation on the southern edge of the Sahara to combat desertification and mitigate climate change.
Several countries have also made a great deal of noise about marshaling huge public efforts to plant hundreds of millions of trees in a single day, for example India and Ethiopia.
These big schemes are all well and good: they generate a lot of publicity for actions on climate change and a warm, fuzzy feeling that governments and people are Doing Something. But there’s a couple of problems. First of all, planting trees is not enough: we could not plant enough trees in the world to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels. Secondly, planted trees require nurturing. It is not enough just to put in some young plants and hope for the best; a high proportion of trees die even when well looked after. If they are just planted and ignored, who knows how many will survive?
However habitat restoration is important; it’s not a silver bullet solution to climate change, but it is part of our toolbox of Things We Can Do. Just as importantly, restoring habitats provides more opportunities for species to move in response to changing climates, and to recolonise areas from where they have been extirpated. And of course diverse, functioning ecosystems support human societies in ways both tangible and unquantifiable.
With all of this in mind I was interested to read a piece by John Carey in PNAS entitled “The best strategy for using trees to improve climate and ecosystems? Go natural“. There’s some really inspiring stories in here, it’s well worth taking a look. The main message of the article is that allowing forest vegetation to naturally regenerate, from seeds, and dormant roots and stumps, is by far the best way to ensure that trees survive and the restoration is successful. However there’s something fundamental missing from that article: the role of species interactions in determining the survival of these forests over long time scales.
The vast majority of the world’s plants are animal pollinated; this includes trees. Even in the UK where we often associate trees with wind pollination, about 65% of our native species are insect pollinated. In the tropics this can rise to 100% of species within a community. Although many of those trees can engage in some self-pollination, in the long term this is likely to result in genetic problems associated with inbreeding. Outcrossing sex is common in plants for a good reason.
Similarly many trees require animals to move their offspring away from the parent plant. This avoids competition between parent and offspring, and the impacts of diseases and pathogens caused by the Janzen-Connell Effect. I don’t have any comparable statistics on the proportion of trees, regionally and globally, that use animals as seed dispersers (does anyone? Please comment below if I’ve missed something). But I’m willing to bet that it’s a high proportion.
Without pollinators and seed dispersers, restored forests will not flourish in the long term. There seems to be an implicit assumption that once the forests are established, the pollinators and seed dispersers will follow. That may be true up to a point, but it shouldn’t be taken for granted, particularly for isolated fragments of forest with no ecological connections to more established areas of woodland. These are the aspects that are missing from John Carey’s (otherwise fine) article, and indeed from wider discussions about forest restoration and tree planting. As so often when we talk about the conservation of biodiversity we neglect to consider the role of species interactions. I’ve been trying to press home that point for years, on the blog and in papers, and I was pleased to see an interesting contribution to this topic by Pedro Luna and colleagues from Mexico on “Measuring and Linking the Missing Part of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function: The Diversity of Biotic Interactions“.
Let’s not forget: species do not occur in isolation, and the biodiversity of species interactions in fundamental to the ecology of the planet.
Recently I’ve been working with a couple of journalist colleagues at the University of Northampton on a short article exploring the relationship between press freedom and environmental protection in different countries. That piece has just been published on the Democratic Audit website – here’s the link.
I think that the findings are really interesting, and timely in an age when press freedoms are being eroded and journalists physically attacked and even murdered.
Over at the Ideas for Sustainability blog Joern Fischer posted a really interesting piece on 1st January called “A new kind of hope” about the current state of the world and whether, from an environmental perspective, there’s really anything to be optimistic about. If environmental collapse via climate change and over-exploitation is inevitable, the collapse of civilization is not far behind. Joern’s piece is well worth reading, lots to think about in there, and I highly recommend that you take a look.
I posted a comment there which I’m going to copy here and add to because I think it bears repeating.
Going back to at least my student days I always thought that there was only a slim chance of our civilization making it to the end of the 20th century without some kind of catastrophe wiping us out. So it was a surprise to celebrate the millennium as December 1999 segued into January 2000. Since then, whilst I think there’s lots to be optimistic about such as the increase in renewable energy, large-scale habitat restoration in some regions, and a growing recognition of the environmental damage of biocides and plastics, there’s also the nagging fear that it’s too little, too late.
These days I alternate between wild optimism and deep depression over the fate of humanity and of the planet. It’s so easy to get sucked into the vortex of negative environmental narratives and ignore the positive ones. Especially so if you actively use social media. So I try hard to be optimistic and resist the urge to just give up, but the political situation across much of the world makes that difficult. As I learn more about the natural world through my own research and that of others’, and as world events such as Brexit and the rise of the Far Right unfold, I realise how little any of us really know about anything at all. Thus I have a deep suspicion of anyone who spouts certainties, whether they be moral, philosophical, religious, scientific, political, or artistic. All we can do is feel our way into the future, cautiously.
With respect to the question that Joern poses of “If we have to re-build something after some kind of collapse … do we have ideas for what that something will be?”, this is the rationale behind the Dark Mountain Project, a loose collaboration of writers, artists, thinkers, etc., who are trying to look for new narratives for humanity and the planet we depend upon. I’ve written a couple of pieces for their journal, most recently for issue 10 where I discussed the role of poetry in science. And although I don’t buy into their certainty that there will be a collapse, I think it’s an important project for understanding where we are now, where we’ve been, and where we might be going to. Here’s a link to the project’s website.
The discussion over whether we should be optimistic about the future of the planet that supports us, and how that optimism will play out, is important for scientists, and society at large, to be having. By coincidence as I was writing this post the map above started circulating on Twitter. It’s a Russian teaching aid from 1928 showing the different biomes of the USSR and can be downloaded from this site.
What really struck me about this graphic was the certainty with which it represents the natural world, as if all of this could never change. There are polar bears on ice flows and a frozen tundra in the far north; water still fills the Aral Sea, hyenas feast in the steppe, snow leopards haunt the mountains, Siberian tigers prowl the pine forests. And an optimistic looking whale heads towards Japan. Some of this is gone, some will almost certainly change, but a lot of it we could save, if we want to, saving ourselves in the process.
If you live in the UK and have an interest in wildlife you’ve probably heard about the event that takes place in London this coming Saturday: The People’s Walk for Wildlife. If you follow that link you’ll find a video of Chris Packham explaining what the walk is all about and why he’s organised it, plus logistical information, timings, etc.
Karin and I are going to join the walk and I thought I’d give a brief summary of why I think it’s important for people to take part.
If you watch the video you’ll see that Chris does a great job of laying out the issue of wildlife loss, a loss not just of species but of abundance. There are species that still can be found in Britain but which have declined in numbers by 90% or more over my lifetime. Such species can be found in all of the major groups of biodiversity in this country: birds, mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians, insects and other invertebrates, fungi, and plants. Many, many millions of individuals gone from our countryside.
Why has this happened? Well, the causes are complex and inter-related. Agricultural intensification over the last century has been a major issue as I’ve previously discussed on this blog in relation to pollinator extinctions. But that’s only part of it. Another big problem that we have in the UK is an unwillingness to let nature just get on with itself. We feel that we have to manage everything: Too many ravens? Cull them. Hedgerows or road verges looking a bit untidy? Cut them. Old tree infected with a fungus? Chop it down.
In part this mindset is linked to an idea of what natural heritage should look like, an idea of order within a landscape, of making the countryside look pretty, and of doing things simply because that’s what our predecessors did. A good example was recently tweeted by Dave Goulson who had found mole traps on a Natural Trust property that he visited; as Dave rightly said: “When will we stop slaughtering harmless wildlife that causes us the tiniest inconvenience?” There is no reason in this day and age to kill moles – what conceivable harm do they do? In fact, as ecosystem engineers, they are an important part of the ecology of the British countryside.
One of the reasons why this is happening largely unnoticed by the government agencies responsible for the environment is that our landscapes change at a very slow rate. Indeed places like the Lake District or the Scottish Highlands or the Chiltern Hills look much the same as they have done for hundreds of years. Visually they are still stunning places to visit and that’s why they attract millions of tourists every year, and also why people enjoy living there. But they have lost much of their wildlife and, with it, some of the ecological function that makes them work as ecosystems. If this continues then natural processes such as dispersal of seeds by birds and mammals, and the subsequent maintenance of tree populations, will cease.
But that’s okay isn’t it? Trees and shrubs not establishing themselves: go out and plant them by hand. Is this really what we want? If it is then we will end up turning our countryside into a museum. And not even a very good museum at that: not a museum with dynamic interactive displays, rather a static, dull set of exhibits that you can only peer at through dusty glass.
So that’s why we are joining the People’s Walk for Wildlife next Saturday: this is an important issue and people need to show government that they are concerned. I hope you agree and I hope you will join us.
Dave G. has promised to come dressed as a bumblebee; I’ve seen his costume and he’s a man of his word, so it’ll be worth looking out for him. I can’t promise anything so flamboyant but I may well take a placard that says something like: “Save ALL of our pollinators, not just bees!” If you spot it, do some over and say hello.
Natural history records of plant flowering and pollinator foraging, much of them collected by well informed amateurs, have huge scientific importance. One of the values of such records to ecology is that it allows us to document where these species occur in space and when they are active in time. This can be done at a range of spatial and temporal scales, but large-scale patterns (for example at a country level) are, I think, especially useful because they provide scientific evidence that can inform national conservation strategies.
During 2017 I collaborated with a young early career researcher at the University of Sussex, Dr Nick Balfour, on an analysis of the phenologies of British pollinators and insect pollinated plants. That study was recently published (see citation below) and I think that the results are fascinating.
Nick did most of the leg work on this, which involved assessing more than one million records that document the activity times of aculeate wasps, bees, butterflies and hoverflies held in the databases by three of the UK’s main insect recording organisations, the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society (BWARS), the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) and the Hoverfly Recording Scheme (HRS). Information on flowering times was taken from a standard British flora (Clapham et al. 1990 – Flora of the British Isles. Cambridge University Press).
As well as looking at annual flight periods and flowering trends for these organisms we also focused on pollinator and plant species that were endangered or extinct. Here are some headline results and thoughts on what the work shows:
Here’s the full citation of Nick’s study with a link to the publisher’s website, and a copy of the abstract is below. If anyone wants a PDF, drop me a line:
Abstract:
The long-term decline of wild and managed insect pollinators is a threat to both agricultural output and biodiversity, and has been linked to decreasing floral resources. Further insight into the temporal relationships of pollinators and their flowering partners is required to inform conservation efforts. Here we examined the
phenology of British: (i) pollinator activity; (ii) insect-pollinated plant flowering; and (iii) extinct and endangered pollinator and plant species. Over 1 million records were collated from the historical databases of three British insect monitoring organisations, a global biodiversity database and an authoritative text covering the national flora. Almost two-thirds (62%) of pollinator species have peak flight observations during late-summer
(July and August). This was the case across three of the groups studied: aculeate wasps (71% of species), bees (60%), and butterflies (72%), the exception being hoverflies (49%). When species geographical range (a proxy for abundance) was accounted for, a clear late-summer peak was clear across all groups. By contrast, there is marked temporal partitioning in the flowering of the major plant groups: insect-pollinated tree species blossoming predominantly during May (74%), shrubs in June (69%), and herbs in July (83%). There was a positive correlation between the number of pollinator species on the wing and the richness of both flowering insect pollinated herbs and trees/shrubs species, per calendar month. In addition, significantly greater extinctions occurred in late-summer-flying pollinator species than expected (83% of extinct species vs. 62% of all species). This trend was driven primarily by bee extinctions (80% vs. 60%) and was not apparent in other groups. We contend that this is principally due to declines in late-summer resource supplies, which are almost entirely provisioned by herbs, a consequence of historical land-use change. We hypothesize that the seasonality of interspecific competition and the blooming of trees and mass-flowering crops may have partially buffered spring flying pollinators from the impacts of historical change.
Despite my best efforts I’ve not been able to produce a daily post about the International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Shenzhen. The days were just too busy: too many interesting people to talk to; too many great talks to see; too much cold beer to be drunk and tasty food to be eaten; and a too-comfortable bed to collapse into at the end of a long, long day.
It’s Sunday today, and the closing ceremony took place yesterday afternoon. Speeches were made and thanks offered to our Chinese hosts. It was a fitting end to what has been a truly remarkable conference, the like of which I’ve never previously experienced, and may never again. It wasn’t just the scale of it – almost 7,000 delegates giving and attending hundreds of talks – but just the very positive buzz of all of these plant scientists determined to make a difference in some way, through their research and education and outreach work. That’s been the main theme of this conference: that a healthy global population living in a safe and sustainable world is not possible without plants, and to achieve that we must take the plant sciences very, very seriously indeed. Plants are the foundation of our civilization and the key to surviving the future.
Anyone who doubts that last sentence should have joined us the other day when we made a short visit to a local fruit and vegetable market. Beautifully displayed on low stalls was botanical produce that reflected both thousands of years of Chinese cultivation and crop breeding, including food plants not very familiar in the west……
….together with the produce that’s only been a part of the Chinese diet for a few hundred years, or less, following its introduction from Europe and the Americas, including current staples such as chillies, squashes and potatoes:
Global movements of food crops have enriched diets and supported the populations of entire countries: most of the fruit and vegetables that we eat in the UK, for instance, are not even native to Europe let alone the British Isles.
During this trip to the market I was able to add two new plant families to my life list of those I’ve eaten. They were Sauruaceae (the leaves and rhizomes of Houttuynia cordata) and Portulacaceae (Portulaca oleracea being a common leaf vegetable in some parts of the world, but not the UK). That brings my current total of pant families I’ve eaten to more than 90.
That theme of the importance of plants was codified by the launch at the IBC of the Shenzhen Declaration on Plant Sciences, on which the Natural History Museum’s Sandy Knapp has been an author; hopefully you can read the seven priorities in this image:
The Shenzhen Declaration provides both a rallying call for plant scientists to convince their governments of the importance of their work, but also highlights how seriously China takes the whole concept of sustainable development. It’s remarkable (but actually perfectly logical) that such a fast developing country should be the prime mover in the area of green sustainability. Only time will tell if they are doing enough, at a pace that will make a difference.
There were a couple of awards made at the closing ceremony, including the first ever Shenzhen Award to Prof. Peter Raven, 81 years old and still going strong. Earlier in the week a colleague introduced me to this giant of botany and evolutionary biology, and I got to shake his hand, feeling a bit awe struck I have to admit!
The Engler Medal went to Chinese botanist Prof. Hong Deyuan for his systematic work on paeonies and other Chinese plants:
So, that’s it for another six years. IBC 20 will be held in Rio in 2023; the Shenzhen Congress has set a high bar, but we’re sure that Brazil can match it!
Today I’m off to Fairy Lake Botanical Garden to do a bit of exploring with some colleagues, then I fly home tomorrow evening. It’s been a wonderful trip but I’m looking forward to seeing my family, our cats, and how our garden has changed in the short time I’ve been away. My sincerest thanks to all the friends and colleagues who have made this such a stimulating and extraordinary conference. Especial thanks to our Chinese hosts who made us feel so welcome, and the IBC Awards Committee for providing me with an “Excellent Scholar” award to enable me to take part. Over and out from Shenzhen.
