Bees increase seed set of wild plants while the proportion of arable land has a variable effect on pollination in European agricultural landscapes

Background and aims - Agricultural intensification and loss of farmland heterogeneity have contributed to population declines of wild bees and other pollinators, which may have caused subsequent declines in insect-pollinated wild plants. Material and methods - Using data from 37 studies on 22 pollinator-dependent wild plant species across Europe, we investigated whether flower visitation and seed set of insect-pollinated plants decline with an increasing proportion of arable land within 1 km. Key results - Seed set increased with increasing flower visitation by bees, most of which were wild bees, but not with increasing flower visitation by other insects. Increasing proportion of arable land had a strongly variable effect on seed set and flower visitation by bees across studies. Conclusion - Factors such as landscape configuration, local habitat quality, and temporally changing resource availability (e.g. due to mass-flowering crops or honey bee hives) could have modified the effect of arable land on pollination. While our results highlight that the persistence of wild bees is crucial to maintain plant diversity, we also show that pollen limitation due to declining bee populations in homogenized agricultural landscapes is not a universal driver causing parallel losses of bees and insect-pollinated plants.Peer reviewe

Non-bee insects are important contributors to global crop pollination

Wild and managed bees are well documented as effective pollinators of global crops of economic importance. However, the contributions by pollinators other than bees have been little explored despite their potential to contribute to crop production and stability in the face of environmental change. Non-bee pollinators include flies, beetles, moths, butterflies, wasps, ants, birds, and bats, among others. Here we focus on non-bee insects and synthesize 39 field studies from five continents that directly measured the crop pollination services provided by non-bees, honey bees, and other bees to compare the relative contributions of these taxa. Non-bees performed 25–50% of the total number of flower visits. Although non-bees were less effective pollinators than bees per flower visit, they made more visits; thus these two factors compensated for each other, resulting in pollination services rendered by non-bees that were similar to those provided by bees. In the subset of studies that measured fruit set, fruit set increased with non-bee insect visits independently of bee visitation rates, indicating that non-bee insects provide a unique benefit that is not provided by bees. We also show that non-bee insects are not as reliant as bees on the presence of remnant natural or seminatural habitat in the surrounding landscape. These results strongly suggest that non-bee insect pollinators play a significant role in global crop production and respond differently than bees to landscape structure, probably making their crop pollination services more robust to changes in land use. Non-bee insects provide a valuable service and provide potential insurance against bee population declines

Open Access in Swedish Private Sector R&D

Open Access (OA) is defined as the free, online, immediate, permanent access to scientific and scholarly material in full-text. Open Access practices have reached the universities and now nearly all university researchers report knowledge of OA. Statistics Sweden (SCB) has estimated that 75% of all money invested in research activities in Sweden is done by private companies. In spite of this, the private sector has been relatively absent from the Open Access discussion and development, in contrast to the universities. The goal of this project was to study the advance of OA practices in the private sector. The method was to visit a number of Swedish companies and present the OA concept. After the presentations web-based surveys were distributed to measure previous knowledge of OA, publishing and readership practices, and views of the matter. Knowledge and awareness of Open Access is less within companies than at universities, although it seems to increase with publishing practices and higher educational degree. The publishing practices, and to lesser extent the reading practices, of scientific articles is less within companies, which could lead to a skewed funding situation for a future Open Access-economy based on an “author-pays” model. In discussions regarding how companies might pay for Open Access we therefore suggest that the flow of information needs to be guarded so that the benefit of access to scientific data does not become limited for companies and industry in a new way, as is already seen by some Open Access journals. The researchers’ access to information should be the same irrespective of whether they work at a company or at the university