UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Species Distribution Models for Crop Pollination : A Modelling Framework Applied to Great Britain

Insect pollination benefits over three quarters of the world’s major crops. There is growing concern that observed declines in pollinators may impact on production and revenues from animal pollinated crops. Knowing the distribution of pollinators is therefore crucial for estimating their availability to pollinate crops; however, in general, we have an incomplete knowledge of where these pollinators occur. We propose a method to predict geographical patterns of pollination service to crops, novel in two elements: the use of pollinator records rather than expert knowledge to predict pollinator occurrence, and the inclusion of the managed pollinator supply. We integrated a maximum entropy species distribution model (SDM) with an existing pollination service model (PSM) to derive the availability of pollinators for crop pollination. We used nationwide records of wild and managed pollinators (honey bees) as well as agricultural data from Great Britain. We first calibrated the SDM on a representative sample of bee and hoverfly crop pollinator species, evaluating the effects of different settings on model performance and on its capacity to identify the most important predictors. The importance of the different predictors was better resolved by SDM derived from simpler functions, with consistent results for bees and hoverflies. We then used the species distributions from the calibrated model to predict pollination service of wild and managed pollinators, using field beans as a test case. The PSM allowed us to spatially characterize the contribution of wild and managed pollinators and also identify areas potentially vulnerable to low pollination service provision, which can help direct local scale interventions. This approach can be extended to investigate geographical mismatches between crop pollination demand and the availability of pollinators, resulting from environmental change or policy scenarios. Citation: Polce C, Termansen M, Aguirre-Gutiérrez J, Boatman ND, Budge GE, et al. (2013) Species Distribution Models for Crop Pollination: A Modelling Framework Applied to Great Britain. PLoS ONE 8(10): e76308. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0076308 Editor: Giovanni G. Vendramin, CNR, Italy Received March 28, 2013; Accepted August 23, 2013; Published October 14, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Polce et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This study was carried out within the project ‘‘Sustainable pollination services for UK crops’’ (http://www.reading.ac.uk/caer/Project_IPI_Crops/project_ ipi_crops_index.html), funded jointly by BBSRC, Defra, NERC, the Scottish Government, the Wellcome Trust and the LWEC, under the Insect Pollinators Initiative (https://wiki.ceh.ac.uk/display/ukipi/Home). JA-G received funding from the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT), reference 214731/ 310005. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: chiara.polce@gmail.com