Crop pollination journal articles
A Stanford researcher has collaborated with other researchers including UC SAREP’s agricultural ecologist Robert L. Bugg on the publication “The area requirements of an ecosystem service: crop pollination by native bee communities in California,” in Ecology Letters, 7:1109-1119.
In the summer of 1997, Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist who was based at the Center for Conservation Biology, Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, enlisted Bugg in a collaboration about landscape-scale studies of native bees and their importance in pollinating crop plants. Kremen also recruited UC Davis emeritus professor of entomology Robbin W. Thorp, Neal Williams, John Fay, and other researchers in a series of related studies from 1998 through 2004, jointly based at Stanford, Princeton, and Davis. The field work was conducted in Sacramento, Solano, and Yolo counties, and evaluated sunflower, cherry tomato, and watermelon pollination.
The latest publication from the project highlights the statistically significant positive effect of nearby upland wild vegetation in promoting pollination services by native bees in watermelon fields. Other factors that did not significantly affect these services included farm type (organic vs. conventional), insecticide use, field size, and honeybee (Apis mellifera) abundance.
Other articles that have been produced by Kerman’s pollination project are listed here.
Kremen, C. 2004. Pollination services and community composition: does it depend on diversity, abundance, biomass or species traits? Pp. 115-123 in Solitary Bees: Conservation, Rearing and Management for Pollination (Freitas, B.M. and Pereira, J.O.P., eds), Beberibe, Ceara, Brazil.
Kremen, C., Bugg, R.L., Nicola, N., Smith, S.A., Thorp, R.W., and Williams, N.M. 2002a. Native bees, native plants and crop pollination in California. Fremontia 30:41-49.
Kremen, C. and Ricketts, T. 2000. Global perspectives on pollination disruptions. Conservation Biology 14(5):1226-1228.
Kremen, C., Williams, N.M. and Thorp, R.W. 2002b. Crop pollination from native bees at risk from agricultural intensification. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99:16812-16816.
For more information, contact Claire Kremen, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Guyot Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540; ckremen@princeton.edu; www.eeb.princeton.edu/FACULTY/Kremen/kremen.html
