From Bloom to Boom: How PollinAction is Reviving Pollinator Populations (Ep. 47)

Both wild pollinators and honeybees provide numerous benefits to society, from food security to the conservation of biodiversity. Today we’re talking about the PollinAction project whose goal is to mitigate the pollination crisis through strategic planning and implementation of green infrastructure to increase diversity in rural and urban landscapes. 

The project is co-funded by the European Union, is coordinated by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, involves multiple partners and spans Italy and Spain. It focuses on creating and improving habitats for pollinators, monitoring effectiveness, and spreading awareness about their importance. The program began in January 2020 and will run until March 2025. Our guest, Leonardo Lorenzato, is a Research Fellow at Venice’s Ca’ Foscari University and one of the project’s researchers.

Good to know

Leonardo mentioned that the project only uses autochthonous plants. This means they are using species that are native to the particular agricultural systems they are working in.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bees Knees, a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer and I thank you for being here.

In recent decades, there’s been a huge reduction in pollinator populations worldwide. affecting agriculture production and biodiversity. According to the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, over 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators, mostly bees and butterflies, are at risk of extinction.

PollinAction is a European program that’s looking to make an impact on these at risk pollinator populations. We’re talking to Leonardo Lorenzato, a research fellow deeply involved in this project. [00:01:00] We discuss the initiatives, challenges, and successes of PollinAction and why it’s crucial for saving wild bees.

What initially motivated the creation of the Life PollinAction Project? Well, the Life PollinAction was motivated by the decline in insect diversity and abundance, which is taking place worldwide. There are many publication, scientific papers about this issue. And in my opinion, one of the most interesting one, is a German study by Alman and colleagues from 2017 which highlighted how in the last 30 years in Germany, over 75% of insects, biomass was completely gone.

So this, in my opinion, enlighted very well the magnitude of the problem we are facing and the reasons why pollinators. are [00:02:00] declining are related almost only to human activities. Um, human activities that create pollution, that has like, um, foster the climate change. But like, the main drivers of pollinator decline is landscape modification.

Landscape modifications in terms of increasing urbanization, increasing intensive agricultural activities, and all of these man made activities basically fragmented the landscape and like they erase from the landscape all those little habitats that pollinator needs to their survival.

So these are the main reasons why we decided to create the Life PollinAction Project. And we decided to, like, make the interventions that we will talk, um, in the following minutes. We decided to create the [00:03:00] project, uh, and in the, um, Northern part of Italy, specifically in the Po Valley, which is like this big lowlands in northern Italy that represents the drivers that are like threatening pollinators because it is a very polluted area.

And it’s basically all urbanized or, um, densely managed in terms of agricultural practices. And consequently, pollinators are very rare and are going extinct in particular in these areas. So that’s the point. So, what would you say are the three main goals of the project? Well, first, the main goal is to mitigate the pollinator crisis.

And in order to do that, we decided to adopt a green infrastructure strategy in basically by constructing or by boosting [00:04:00] pollinator habitats. In particular, we. create four types of pollinator habitats, which consists of species, rich grasslands, um, flower strips, both mesophilus and hygrophilus and shrub patches and hedgerows.

The reason why we decided to construct these four types of areas is related to the needs of pollinators, because For example, species rich grasslands and flower strips provide the resources for pollinators, basically pollen and nectar. And while shrub patches and hedges are perfect nesting sites for pollinators, because if you want to protect pollinators, you have to give them food, but also A place where they can, like, create their nest or spend the cold months.

And also, these areas, the shrub patches and the hedges, provide the resources for pollinators [00:05:00] in the first part of the season when, like, the flowers in the fields haven’t bloomed yet. So, This is the main goal. So construct a green infrastructure to protect pollinators. Then, another goal of the project was to like, trying to make all of these In some way, like economically sustainable, because it is not so easy to like involve other people if we don’t talk about economic sustainability.

And in this field, we tried to construct some supply chains activities related to our actions. And finally, the third goal was to boost the knowledge of. people about this topic. A couple things I want to ask you about here, specifically when we’re talking about involving the local communities and the stakeholders.

[00:06:00] Can you share a little bit about what economic strategies you introduced here? Yeah. So basically all the intervention areas That we have created were from private property or public property, but, uh, like managed by, for example, municipalities. So we tried to gave also an economic opportunity to the people that decided to gave us their terrain.

And well, if you like construct. If you create a species rich grassland and you are a farmer in the following years, you will see an increase in your production, but that may be not enough to get the approval of the farmers. So for example, we created these supply chains. One is called like a I have no idea how to say the name in English because it’s in Italian.

I will try out like a sort of translation. It [00:07:00] is like honey from species rich grasslands, something like that. So all the farmers that has these improved grasslands from PollinAction may sell their honey. With like a label that certify that the honey is produced from like bee friendly farms. Um, another important, um, supply chain is that, is the one related to the like high rich in species supply chain.

So basically one of the strategy that we adopted to recreate these habitats was not simply like sowing, Seeds or things like that, but it was going to an already existent species rich grasslands cut the grass at the proper time and use the hay of that grasslands to create Another grasslands is [00:08:00] a particular technique that we have used and it’s pretty effective.

And so we have tried to create a business behind that in order to promote this and to see if other people will join us from this activity. And the third supply chain is the one related to milk productions from all the cattle that feeds these species rich hay. And also, in this case, the farmer can like put a label on the milk to like state that this milk is produced by a bee friendly farmer.

So how would you say the local communities are reacting to these efforts? Oh, well, it depends. It depends because it’s a very big project. So we have like encountered many different stakeholders, many different people. And it [00:09:00] depends on like how much they feel these things. We have some municipalities and some farmers that were very good.

They, they, they did their things in an exceptional way. And so they were very proud and they were happy and some of them didn’t do like, for example, the management in a proper way. So the results were less, less like notable. And maybe in this case, they were less interested in going on, but apart from this, all the people that were not directly involved in the project on which we like get in contact with the majority were like interested in that we currently we are doing many focus groups.

With farmers all around Italy and almost every time there is at least one farmer which is interested in what we have done and is [00:10:00] asking for our guidelines because to like spread the information to other people we have created guidelines that tell you how to create and manage green areas for pollinators in both agricultural sites and urban sites.

So how do you plan to measure success in terms of the pollinator population recovery, but also ecosystem health? Well, we have already started doing that and this is one of the new aspects of the project which differentiates it from other projects. And it is the pollination network approach. So basically the other projects, when they like wanted to see the results of an improvement of the landscape, they simply measure if this improvement has enriched in some way the number of species [00:11:00] of pollinators or their abundance while we have tried to do something else something more difficult, which is understand if the improvement of the landscape has increased the service of pollination and to do that, we have monitored the pollination network, which basically consists of all of the interactions between bees

 and other pollinators and the plants. And once you are able to create this network by monitoring insects in the fields, you see all of the interactions, which insects go mostly where, and you are able to calculate some metrics. I will try to be very simple because it’s a very complex thing. If these metrics tell you that the network has become.

More complex and more redundant and more big. Well, you have done [00:12:00] a good job. Because if a proper pollination network to work well, must be complex and redundant. Because if a pollinator, for example, went extinct, if the pollination network is redundant, another species will take its place. And so the pollination process will remain stable.

While if the pollination network is not redundant, it’s very simple. If a pollinator species went extinct, there may be the possibility of, like, other extinctions at cascade. And so the pollination network may collapse. In some cases. So that’s one thing. Well, in terms of ecosystem health, we have also monitored other ecosystem services, which are like all the services that nature provides, um, from which human like And so we have [00:13:00] monitored, for example, the quantity of carbon dioxide stocks in the ground, because if you create more semi natural habitats like we have done, you for sure will enhance the pollination process, but you will also boost other ecosystem services like this one.

We have also make some questionaries to see if people appreciate more the landscape with these interventions, which also this is an ecosystem services. And we have also. monitored the presence and the abundance of parasitoids and predators, which are insects that are extremely important for agriculture and because they eat all of those parasites or like insects that kill the plants.

And we have seen an increase in all of these services. Accept the [00:14:00] appreciation of landscape because we haven’t done like the second survey, the one after the project. Um, these were some of the ecosystem services that we have taken into consideration. So you’re implementing the project in the Italian region that you described for us, but also a region in Spain.

Um, what have you learned about the differing environmental dynamics between these areas? Oh, well, for example, in the Po Valley, I think that we have different problems in comparison to Northern Spain. Here in the Northern Italy, the main problems that are impacting the pollinator survival are, as I already told you, urbanization and agricultural activities.

While in Spain. Urbanization is something which is not so strong, [00:15:00] in particular in the Aragon region, there are not too many settlements. And I think that in that case, it’s more the agricultural practices that are impacting pollinators. In addition, there in Spain, they are also studying how honeybees impacts wild pollinators because there in Spain, it is a problem because many people think that honeybees are like these super efficient pollinators.

While in the reality, honeybees are good pollinators, but they are lazy. They decide one or two species of flowers, the most abundant one, and they go only on them. And, in addition to this, they are also very competitive, so they don’t let any space to other species. So, if there are too many honeybees, [00:16:00] There are no wild pollinators or very few and consequently for the fact that honey bees decided to visit just two or three species, all the other one does not receive a proper pollination process.

And so, our , Spanish colleagues are trying to understand how to deal with this, because I don’t want to say that honeybees are bad, but to manage it correctly, there must be a proper number of hives in the landscape, and that must be related to resources and to many things. Let’s go back a bit. Can you tell me about the techniques and strategies you adopted?

In order to create these green areas, these semi natural areas, we have adopted different strategies. For example, for the creation of the shrub patches and the hedgerows, the strategy is this only one [00:17:00] and it is the planting of the young seedlings. There is no better way to do that. While, for example, for the wild flower strips and the species rich grasslands, there are different techniques.

One, of course, consists of planting the plants, but it’s really time consuming. And if they decide it is Not too bad at the beginning of the project. If the grassland has some species in this goldfield, you can adopt two other techniques that we saw that results in a better intervention. One is by sowing seeds.

Produced by a local agency that produce autochthonous seeds. Yeah, we have only used autochthonous plants. We haven’t used exotic plants because, like, we thought that that is the best way to reconstruct [00:18:00] habitats that has gone. And Going back to the strategy. The other one is using species rich hay from other grasslands and all of these strategies.

Which, like, the proper instructions are all written in the guidelines that the project has created. They are almost ready, and they will be in three languages, which are Italian, English, and Spanish. So, by the end of the project, all of these guidelines should be available on the website of the project, and for everyone who wants to, like, implement.

These actions on his property, they could be like good starting point because there is something that I would like to underline and that is that if you want to protect bees, it is not necessary to convert hectares and hectares of [00:19:00] agricultural fields into species rich grasslands. Well, this will be very, very nice.

But. Also, like, if you have a small marginal areas in your garden that you don’t use, just simply using that area in a bee friendly way will be something that can help you. Could, like, help the pollinators. So, this is something that everyone can do. Everyone can help bees in this, like, little world. So, is that your answer to my final question?

Which is, if you could encourage people to do just one thing to help support native bees, what would it be? Well, if they have a garden, maybe let a little part of the garden, a bit more wild, and that is something which is very simple and I think that’s maybe not a problem at all. [00:20:00] And while if someone has not a garden, he may simply buy some autochthonous species and put it in his balcony, for example, or Um, you can create the bee hotels or those things that help insects to find a place to construct their nest.

Things like that. And, well, of course, talking about the pollinator issues with other people. PollinACTION is addressing such a variety of bee challenges. Landscape modifications, community support, and increasing bee abundance and diversity in regions whose environments are no longer welcoming to native bees.

Monitoring the pollinator networks, working with local farmers, and tying it all back to the ecosystem’s health will be invaluable for other regions looking to similarly support their wild bee populations. My thanks to Leonardo for joining [00:21:00] us today and thank you for listening. Visit the website, thebeesknees.

website, to learn more about the PollinAction Program. What’s your actionable advice from Leonardo? Let a little bit of your garden go wild and talk about pollinator issues. Until next time, start talking.