What is a bee really worth? Mapping the economics of crop pollination

Pollination by bees and other insects is a key ecosystem service for UK agriculture, underpinning the productivity of millions of pounds of crops each year. At present, pollinators are under pressure from intensive land use practices, habitat loss and climate change, potentially driving shortfalls in production of a number of crops like apples, strawberries and oilseed rape. Part of the challenge faced by research is understanding how pollinators are distributed through the UK and how that affects crop productivity. This projects aims to map the distribution of key crop pollinators across the UK and measure their contribution to crop pollination in terms of yield, quality and economic outputs. Focussing on oilseed rape (OSR) production (the most widely grown insect pollinated crop in the UK), this project will identify the possible consequences of crop pollinator decline to UK arable farming and help target management to support pollinators for improved crop production.

Based at the University of Reading, this project will combine theoretical and practical ecology with economics to address a key research challenge which will provide strong applied outputs with real impact potential. This PhD project has 3 primary objectives:

1. Use existing national recording scheme data to predict annual occurrence of key OSR crop pollinator species across the UK.
2. Combine existing and newly generated field data to quantify the contribution of insect pollinators to the yield and quality of different varieties of OSR in the UK.
3. Use ecological economic techniques to value the contribution of insect pollinators to OSR production at the field, landscape and National scales.

The first year of the project will involve the student becoming familiar with the necessary techniques for mapping the presence and absence of key pollinator species across the UK using long term historical record data. Building on this foundation, in the subsequent years of the project species distribution maps will be generated to identify areas where key oilseed rape insect pollinators are likely to be found across the UK, in relation to where oilseed rape crops are grown, and how relative population abundances of the pollinating insects change between years (Objective 1). In parallel with this spatiotemporal mapping work, a number of targeted experimental trials will be carried out to better understand the pollination ecology of OSR and identify the contribution insect pollinators make to agronomic outputs of this important crop (Objective 2). These trials will be carried out at the flight cage facility on the UoR Whiteknights campus and at the Sonning University Farm. The combined outputs of the population distribution models and field trials will be used to develop integrated bio-economic models to project the distribution of pollination services across the UK and applied to estimate the value of pollination services to arable farmers and highlight areas that are likely to have sub-optimal access to pollination services (Objective 3).

Through the project, the successful candidate will develop considerable expertise in spatially explicit ecological and economic modelling as well as working on controlled crop pollination trials and contribute significantly to the understanding of pollination service availability and management across the UK.