PollenNet: Using pollinators to increase farm resilience

The COVID19 pandemic has exacerbated ongoing challenges with meeting pollination needs to ensure optimal crop yields in fruit trees and many other crops. Bee farmers have been unable to replenish bee populations as imports of bees from southern Europe were stopped in the lockdown. Innovations that make our pollination services more resilient are urgently needed. Agricultural management practices that support and increase the abundance of wild pollinators will reduce reliance on imported bees and result in more resilient crop production. A good understanding of pollinator ecology underpins management strategies to promote wild pollinators. However, insect biodiversity monitoring programmes have suffered setbacks as most of them rely on volunteer surveillance which were on hold during the lockdown.

To address these challenges, the PollenNet project will pilot an innovative new device for low-cost automated monitoring of pollinator abundance on fruit crops. Automated monitoring of pollinators is a step-change in agronomic management with continuous daily counting of insect visitation across a farm making information on pollinator visitation more accessible to farmers. With this information, farmers can make decisions about whether to purchase bees, move existing bee habitats and ideally, create habitats to encourage wild pollinators, reducing reliance on purchased bees. As such, implementation of automated pollination monitoring helps to mitigate challenges with ensuring sufficient information supports effective pollination and pollinator management presented by the covid-19 pandemic.