| dc.description.abstract | In 2012, the Norwegian Environmental Agency funded an extension to the Global Pollination Project, coordinated by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) to expand the number of connected countries from 7 fully participating to in total 13 countries. This international effort seeks to build capacity for pollination studies and add to the knowledge base for the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES is currently conducting its first fast track case study on pollination. Specifically, the Global Pollination Project implements the “Protocol to detect and assess pollination deficits in crops: a handbook for its use” (Vaissière et al. 2011), developed through the FAO. The proto-col outlines a unified method to investigate pollination and measure pollination deficits in vari-ous agricultural systems around the world. NINA (the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research) was tasked with setting up a Norwegian collaboration to implement the protocol in Norway, to analyse its applicability to Nordic conditions and evaluate its strength in relation to alternative research strategies. The present report is the result of this effort.
This report does not communicate the final results of the analyses, as they will be conducted in the two larger “host-projects” that made the implementation of the protocol possible. Instead, it outlines the rationale of the protocol, and evaluates its potential for providing management rel-evant information on pollination deficits, with particular emphasis on Norway. We discuss the state and trends of pollination dependent crops in Norway, as a background for the need for pollination in Norwegian Agriculture.
The protocol is general enough to be applied to a wide variety of settings, and we did not expe-rience any fundamental problems of implementing it in a Nordic setting. We did however notice challenges to an effective implementation, which might be especially pronounced in a Norwe-gian or Scandinavian setting. First, it can be difficult to find a wide enough range of factors that influence pollinators to efficiently analyse the importance of pollination without resorting to ma-nipulative treatments. For example, the amount of flower resources and fragmentation of habi-tat are factors known to influence pollinators. But many crops are spatially aggregated to rela-tively narrow valleys and therefore experience similar surroundings. Secondly, it can be chal-lenging to find enough replicate farms since Norway is a relatively small agricultural nation. Thirdly, pollinators in Norway (as in many other parts of the world) are intractably linked to ag-ricultural and animal husbandry practices that provide a diversity of flowering resources neces-sary for pollinating insects, yet these practices and resulting resources in the surrounding land-scape is not sufficiently captured by the survey protocol.
The protocol is designed to estimate differences in yield given differences in pollination, and various methods are available to approach optimal pollination, that acts as benchmark. Esti-mating the effect of pollination on yield is the foundation to understanding the status of pollina-tion deficits for any crop. The protocol appears to be a successful effort to create a unified standard of measuring pollination and pollination deficits by this definition. It thus marks a great improvement for pollination research in agriculture internationally.
Pollination, Ecosystem services, Bees, Bumble bees, Pollination deficit Protocol, FAO, IPBES, Policy, apple, red clover, Norway, pollinering, økosystemtjenester, bier, humler, protokoll for polline-ringsunderskudd, FAO, IPBES, eple, rødkløver | |