March 2024: Spring is the Time to Celebrate our Pollinators!
Among ecologists and wildlife advocates alike, there is a growing concern about reintegration of Earth’s natural processes, such as interactions among organisms, in restoration projects. These processes, also known as ecosystem services, provide things we can see such as erosion reduction and species diversity as well as things we can’t see like genetic diversity. All of these processes are crucial to supporting and regulating the environment for both human and wildlife populations alike.
One of these key processes is the plant-pollinator interactions that contribute to both ecosystem biodiversity and a system’s ability to adapt to stressors such as climate change. Pollinators serve an important role in an ecosystem by fostering the production of fruits and seeds, thus promoting plant reproduction. This is especially important in degraded systems as native plants are often competing with invasive plants. A strong plant-pollinator relationship allows the native plants a reproductive advantage over the invasive. However, due to land development, our landscape has been divided up and converted to different uses such as housing, agriculture and commercial properties. This is known as habitat fragmentation and limits wildlife corridors, ultimately leading to a lack of genetic diversity in wildlife populations. A major factor in reestablishment of plant-pollinator interactions in a restored system is landscape connectivity*, which is the physical and genetic link of various communities of organisms, promoting gene flow and biodiversity. Community members like us can take action against habitat fragmentation by building and maintaining habitat for pollinators in our gardens!
Read more about the response of pollinators to landscape connectivity in a study performed in Sweden; and a news story of a project aiming to promote ecosystem restoration through supporting pollinator communities in Arizona! While they take place in different parts of the world, both the study and the news story illustrate examples of how plant-pollinator interactions foster a boom in species richness for both the plants and the pollinators, and how this ecological process is approachable for the common person to play their part in restoring.
*Ceccon, E., and I.G Varassin. “Plant-Pollinator Interactions in Ecosystem Restoration.” Frontiers in Ecology, Evolution and Complexity, Publishing Open Access, 2014, pp. 50–63.
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