Pollination in Agroecosystems: A Review of the Conceptual Framework with a View to Sound Monitoring

The pollination ecology in agroecosystems tackles a landscape in which plants and pollinators need to adjust, or be adjusted, to human intervention. A valid, widely applied approach is to regard pollination as a link between specific plants and their pollinators. However, recent evidence has added l...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Land (Basel) 2021-05, Vol.10 (5), p.540
Main Authors: Giovanetti, Manuela, Albertazzi, Sergio, Flaminio, Simone, Ranalli, Rosa, Bortolotti, Laura, Quaranta, Marino
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural ecosystems
Agriculture
agroecosystems
Bees
Crops
Ecological monitoring
Farming
Landscape
landscape analysis
Landscape ecology
Oilseeds
Plant reproduction
Pollination
Pollinators
Questions
Rape plants
Taxonomy
vegetation
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Summary:The pollination ecology in agroecosystems tackles a landscape in which plants and pollinators need to adjust, or be adjusted, to human intervention. A valid, widely applied approach is to regard pollination as a link between specific plants and their pollinators. However, recent evidence has added landscape features for a wider ecological perspective. Are we going in the right direction? Are existing methods providing pollinator monitoring tools suitable for understanding agroecosystems? In Italy, we needed to address these questions to respond to government pressure to implement pollinator monitoring in agroecosystems. We therefore surveyed the literature, grouped methods and findings, and evaluated approaches. We selected studies that may contain directions and tools directly linked to pollinators and agroecosystems. Our analysis revealed four main paths that must come together at some point: (i) the research question perspective, (ii) the advances of landscape analysis, (iii) the role of vegetation, and (iv) the gaps in our knowledge of pollinators taxonomy and behavior. An important conclusion is that the pollinator scale is alarmingly disregarded. Debate continues about what features to include in pollinator monitoring and the appropriate level of detail: we suggest that the pollinator scale should be the main driver.
ISSN:2073-445X
2073-445X
DOI:10.3390/land10050540