Conservation and Restoration Priorities for Wild Pollinator Habitat
Dates
Publication Date
2019
Start Date
2011-01-01
End Date
2011-12-31
Citation
Warnell, K., 2019, Conservation and Restoration Priorities for Wild Pollinator Habitat: U.S. Geological Survey ScienceBase, https://doi.org/10.21429/69zz-7f78.
Summary
Wild insect pollination has significant positive effects on pollinator-dependent crop production. While managed honeybees are often used to provide pollination to pollinator-dependent crops, visits by wild insect pollinators have been shown to be more effective in increasing fruit set than managed pollinators, and wild insect pollination increases fruit set even when managed pollinator visitation is high (Garibaldi et al. 2013). The total value of the pollination services provided by wild, native insects has been estimated at $3.07 billion annually (2003 dollars) in the United States (Losey & Vaughan 2006). To assess the spatial distribution of potential wild insect pollination, we mapped the supply of potential wild pollinator habitat [...]
Summary
Wild insect pollination has significant positive effects on pollinator-dependent crop production. While managed honeybees are often used to provide pollination to pollinator-dependent crops, visits by wild insect pollinators have been shown to be more effective in increasing fruit set than managed pollinators, and wild insect pollination increases fruit set even when managed pollinator visitation is high (Garibaldi et al. 2013). The total value of the pollination services provided by wild, native insects has been estimated at $3.07 billion annually (2003 dollars) in the United States (Losey & Vaughan 2006).
To assess the spatial distribution of potential wild insect pollination, we mapped the supply of potential wild pollinator habitat (forest, grassland, wetland, and shrubland land cover types) and the demand for pollination (directly pollinator-dependent crops). A foraging travel distance for temperate native bees (1308 meters) was used to estimate relative pollinator activity on cropland based on distance from habitat. We also calculated the proportion of pollinator habitat within pollinator travel distance of crops. Methods for this analysis were adapted from the Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks Landscape Conservation Cooperative mapping project (Olander et al. 2017).
This information was summarized by county and subwatershed (HUC 12) to identify regional priority areas for conservation and restoration of pollinator habitat. Datasets provided include county and subwatershed shapefiles identifying priority areas and including attributes used to select priorities, and raster datasets used to calculate those attributes.
The priority county and subwatershed shapefiles can be used to identify where, at the regional level, conservation of existing pollinator habitat or restoration of pollinator habitat will provide the greatest benefit in terms of wild pollination of pollinator-dependent crops. These can also be overlaid with other data sources at the appropriate scale, including other ecosystem services maps, to find areas where conservation or restoration would provide multiple benefits. The additional fields in the datasets have the necessary information to make slight changes to the identification of priority restoration and conservation areas, and the raster datasets can be used to alter the priority criteria or recalculate metrics for different levels of aggregation. When using these data, please keep in mind that they are designed for landscape-level assessments; due to inaccuracies in the national-scale input datasets, they should not be used to conduct field-level assessments of wild pollination. This information can be used to identify possible target areas for restoration or conservation of wild pollinator habitat, but field validation of potential project areas is necessary to confirm that potential habitat areas are providing wild pollinator habitat and that nearby pollinator-dependent crops exist.
