Ecology and Social Sciences

Plant-animal interactions

More than three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and about 35% of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce, of which bees alone account for 90% of global nutrition. Unfortunately, it has been observed a decrease in the worldwide population of bees due to disease of habitats destruction, among other factors (PM Ferrier et al., USDA-Economic Research Service, March 2018). There is a need for designing more efficient strategies to prevent pollinator extinction while we still maximize the return in food production (L Morawetz et al., PLoS One, 2019; Y Yamada et al., Scientific Reports, 2019). Ongoing experiments in the Fraser Valley, Canada, that consist of introducing wildflowers in or around commercial crops, are aiming to attract more bees so that not only the population of bees will increase and be sustained, but also the crops’ pollination services will be high. I am currently involved in the process of developing a mathematical model that will used to predict how proportion and species of wildflowers to introduce affect the crops’ pollination services. This mathematical models could then be used to inform the experiments in Canada and potentially around the world about various types of crops that could used to sustain the population of natural pollinators, about the effects of landscape configurations, and the effects of seasonality and climate change on the interactions plants-pollinators.