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Insufficient pollinator visitation often limits yield in crop systems worldwide

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Declining pollinator populations could threaten global food production, especially if current crop yields are limited by insufficient pollinator visitation to flowers, in a phenomenon referred to as ‘pollinator limitation’. Here, we assess the global prevalence of pollinator limitation, explore the risk factors, such as crop type or geographic region, that predict where pollinator limitation is more likely and ask by how much increases in pollinator visitation could improve crop yields. We address these questions using 198,360 plant–pollinator interactions and 2,083 yield measurements from 32 crop species grown in 120 study systems. We find that 28–61% of global crop systems are pollinator limited and that this limitation most frequently occurs in blueberry, coffee and apple crops. For a few datasets, we note that the probability of pollinator limitation decreases with greater forest land cover surrounding a crop field at 1 km, although average effect sizes are small. Finally, we estimate that for those crops we identify as pollinator limited, increasing pollinator visitation at all farms to existing levels observed in the 90th percentile of each study system would close 63% of yield gaps between high- and low-yielding fields. Our findings show variations in sensitivity to pollinator limitation across diverse crop systems and indicate that realistic increases in pollinator visitation could mitigate crop yield shortfalls attributable to pollinator limitation.

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Fig. 1: Our global dataset represents 198,360 plant–pollinator interactions and 2,083 yield measurements.
Fig. 2: Three hypothetical relationships between crop yield and insect visitation, resulting in unique pollinator limitation scenarios.
Fig. 3: We estimate that 28–61% of global crops exhibit some pollinator limitation.
Fig. 4: Predicted effects of a range of forested land cover on the probability of pollinator limitation for 79 datasets.
Fig. 5: Illustrative example of yield gap due to changes in pollinator density.

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Data availability

The CropPol data33 used to generate the results of this study are publicly available and continually updated on Zenodo via https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.4311291 (ref. 76).

Code availability

The datafiles, R code and custom Bayesian scripts used to generate the results of this study are available on Figshare via https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24878868.v2 (ref. 77).

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to D.T. Simpson for his independent statistical review of our custom Bayesian script and feedback on our analyses and manuscript. This research was funded by the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant no. 2021- 67012-35153 to K.J.T., and the 2017–2018 Belmont Forum and BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals, under the BiodivScen ERA-Net COFUND programme and with the funding organizations Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain (AEI), Dutch Research Council (NWO), Ministerio de Educación, Cultura, Ciencia y Tecnología, Argentina (ECCyT) and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) to R.W. Additional funding was provided from Programme NWO-Green, which is jointly funded by NWO and Nunhems Netherlands BV (BASF) under project no. 870.15.030 to T.P.M.F. and from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Social Fund through the Ramón y Cajal Program (RYC2021-032351-I) to A.M.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Katherine J. Turo, James R. Reilly & Rachael Winfree

  2. Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation Group, Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Thijs P. M. Fijen

  3. Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), Leioa, Spain

    Ainhoa Magrach

  4. IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain

    Ainhoa Magrach

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  1. Katherine J. Turo
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Contributions

K.J.T. conceived the project, conducted statistical analyses, created figures and tables and wrote and revised the manuscript. J.R.R. conceived the project, conducted statistical analyses, created figures and revised the manuscript. T.P.M.F. provided data, contributed to analyses and revised the manuscript. A.M. provided data and revised the manuscript. R.W. conceived the project and revised the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Katherine J. Turo.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Parthiba Basu, Liam Kendall, Deepa Senapathi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Turo, K.J., Reilly, J.R., Fijen, T.P.M. et al. Insufficient pollinator visitation often limits yield in crop systems worldwide. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02460-2

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