Project Summary

This project investigates the pollination dynamics found between agricultural and native vegetation. While many studies have looked into the importance of wild pollinators to crop production, few have investigated the importance of wild pollinators for the conservation of native plants residing in large-scale agricultural landscapes. A large component of this study is focused in Western Australia, where we study annual wildflower communities and canola crops, looking at the pollination dynamicsbetween these two concurrent flowering systems. This project also looks into how wild-insect mediated crop pollination is impacted by growing conditions, landscape structure and climate change worldwide. For this we investigate what landscape factors influence wild pollination services provided to canola, cashew and apple crops grown around the world. This research will fill in some gaps in our understanding of how remnant flowering vegetation impacts the pollination services received by crops, how an insect-attracting crop impacts the pollination services received by native plants in remnant vegetation of high conservation value, and to determine if the same landscape and growing approaches have consistent impacts on crops commonly grown in very different parts of the world.