Plan Bee: interdisciplinary pollinator conservation for changing agricultural landscapes

Biodiversity conservation must be ecologically effective and socially sustainable to mitigate environmental change, now and in the future. We will address this through a lens of bee conservation in agricultural systems, where multiple drivers such as habitat loss, climate change and pesticide risk threaten bees and pollination services. Our project will extend our ecological model to generate predictions of bees' reproductive output and pollination services in response to habitat loss and climate change. We will test these drivers in isolation and combination to improve the assessment of the combined effects of these multiple drivers on biodiversity. We will then use our ecological model to explore strategies to handle these combined effects – pollinator conservation practices, to fight the twin challenges of habitat loss and climate change in agricultural systems. Finally, we combine this information with people's intent to implement these conservation practices to identify synergies (e.g. increased bee populations and crop pollination services) or trade-offs (e.g. increased bee populations at a cost to the farmer) that may facilitate or impede future bee conservation efforts. Thus, we aim to demonstrate how a paradigm shift to an interdisciplinary approach can provide policy-ready solutions to environmental change and ultimately increase engagement in biodiversity conservation.