Wildness and Wild Spaces in Residential Yards: Changing Neighborhood Norms to Support Pollinator Populations

Insect pollinator populations, critical to the global food supply, are declining. Research has found robust bee communities in cities, which are supported by diverse urban habitat and foraging resources. Accounting for 35–50% of urban green space, U.S. private residential yards can serve as important forage and nesting sources for pollinators. Incorporating wild attributes and wildness, such as native vegetation and less intensive yard-management practices, is key. However, urban vegetation, and its effects on local native bee populations, is shaped by social and cultural preferences, norms, aesthetics, values, and identities. The perfect lawn ideal of a highly manicured turfgrass yard dominates neighborhood landscapes and is often at odds with the habitat needs of pollinators. As part of a three-year study investigating the sociocultural drivers of residential vegetation choices in St. Louis, MO, USA, we interviewed 85 decisionmakers in order to understand choices about private residential yard maintenance. This paper presents an emergent finding concerning how residents conceptualize and talk about the urban-yard aesthetic, using the terms "wild" and "wildness", which reflect a range of levels in the demand for urban wild spaces in their neighborhoods. The discourse of wildness offers a nontechnical route for understanding the connections between the ecological consequences of urbanization, with human attitudes towards nature that shape the biological functioning of human-generated habitats.

No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline

Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News Index developed by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to track news attention to pollinator topics in nearly 25 million news items published by two American national newspapers and four international wire services over the past four decades. We found vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics relative to coverage of climate change, which we use as a comparison topic. In the most recent subset of ∼10 million stories published from 2007 to 2019, 1.39% (137,086 stories) refer to climate change/global warming while only 0.02% (1,780) refer to pollinator populations in all contexts, and just 0.007% (679) refer to pollinator declines. Substantial increases in news attention were detectable only in US national newspapers. We also find that, while climate change stories appear primarily in newspaper “front sections,” pollinator population stories remain largely marginalized in “science” and “back section” reports. At the same time, news reports about pollinator populations increasingly link the issue to climate change, which might ultimately help raise public awareness to effect needed policy changes.

More Than Meets the Eye? The Role of Annual Ornamental Flowers in Supporting Pollinators

Ornamental flowers are commonly planted in urban and suburban areas to provide foraging resources for pollinator populations. However, their role in supporting broad pollinator biodiversity is not well established as previous studies have been conducted in urban landscapes with pollinator communities that are distinct from those in natural systems. We observed pollinator visitation patterns to five ornamental annual plant genera and their cultivars over multiple years at two semi-natural sites in Pennsylvania to understand their potential for supporting diverse pollinator communities. There was significant variation in visitor abundance and diversity by season and year for many annual ornamental cultivars. Within some genera, cultivars had similar visitor abundance, diversity, and main visitor taxa, while cultivars in other genera varied greatly in these measures. We observed only polylectic (pollen generalist) bee species visiting annual ornamentals, despite the presence of oligolectic (pollen specialist) bee species in the background population. We conclude that the attractiveness of annual ornamental plants likely depends on both cultivar characteristics and environmental context. While their role in supporting complex pollinator populations is limited both based on the number of and dietary breadth of the species they support, ornamental plants may nonetheless provide long-lasting supplemental foraging resources for the generalist pollinator communities characteristic of urban and suburban environments.

Remotely Estimating Beneficial Arthropod Populations: Implications of a Low-Cost Small Unmanned Aerial System

Studies show that agricultural land requires investment in the habitat management of non-cropped areas to support healthy beneficial arthropods and the ecosystem services they provide. In a previous small plot study, we manually counted blooms over the season, and found that plots providing greater numbers of flowers supported significantly higher pollinator populations over that of spontaneous weed plots. Here, we examined the potential of deploying an inexpensive small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a tool to remotely estimate floral resources and corresponding pollinator populations. Data were collected from previously established native wildflower plots in 19 locations on the University of Georgia experimental farms in South Georgia, USA. A UAV equipped with a lightweight digital camera was deployed to capture images of the flowers during the months of June and September 2017. Supervised image classification using a geographic information system (GIS) was carried out on the acquired images, and classified images were used to evaluate the floral area. The floral area obtained from the images positively correlated with the floral counts gathered from the quadrat samples. Furthermore, the floral area derived from imagery significantly predicted pollinator populations, with a positive correlation indicating that plots with greater area of blooming flowers contained higher numbers of pollinators.

Pollinator gardens more than triple in visitation rate and diversity of flower-visiting insects than other ornamental plantings in Kingston, Ontario

In this study I determined the effectiveness of pollinator gardens by testing if visitation rate and diversity of flower-visiting insects is higher in pollinator gardens compared to other ornamental plantings. I observed pollinator visitation for individual plant taxa, per unit area, in three different pollinator gardens, eight ornamental gardens and eight ornamental planters on the Queen’s University campus in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Visitation was about 4- times higher in pollinator gardens compared to the other two ornamental garden types and visitor richness (the number of types of pollinators) in pollinator gardens was about 6- times higher compared to ornamental gardens, and about 3- times higher compared toornamental planters. The results of this study conclude that the planting of pollinator gardens is an effective way of supporting pollinator populations in urban areas.

Corrigendum to: Improving vegetation quality for the restoration of pollinators – the relevance of co-flowering species in space and time

Pollination is a key ecosystem function that directly and indirectly provides food for all organisms – regardless of the trophic level. In degraded ecosystems, installing plant and habitat resources for pollinators starts with an understanding of the temporal and spatial habitat needs of pollinators, and the augmentations, the co-factors and conditions required for pollinator populations. These co-factors, not immediately recognised as linked to the provision of pollination services, are critical for complexity and include a diverse array of resources such as food plants for larvae, shelter and temporal legacies of earlier flowering species. Practical steps for restoration include the installation of an array of plant species that provide a staggered supply of flowers and this can be refined to include specific floral types that are the mega supermarkets for nectar and pollen resources in them.