Recently, there is growing concern about deterioration of pollination services for crops due to global pollinator decline. The potential drivers of this decline are habitat loss and fragmentation, spread of parasites and diseases, competition with alien species, and climate change. Among these drivers, habitat loss and fragmentation due to land use change are considered to have an especially strong impact on pollinator species richness and abundance. Thus, many previous studies focused on the relationships among spatial distribution of land-use types, pollinator density, and pollination service. Their findings have been further applied to estimate pollination service from the spatial distribution of land-use types. However, a recent study pointed out that pollination service by bumble bees is better explained by patch-to-patch variation in floral resources and flower species richness within each patch, which directly affect bumble-bee foraging behavior, than by the composition of land-use types. This means that process-based approaches involving foraging behavior of individual pollinators and reproductive ecology of plants will be required for further progress of this research area. Fortunately, pollinators’ behavior and their interaction with plants have been well studied in the fields of basic sciences (e.g., behavioral ecology, plant reproductive biology, and evolutionary biology) for a long time. We expect that by integrating these basic approaches with applied approaches like estimation of pollination service in a given landscape, we can develop cropping patterns effective for pollinator attraction and policies for conservation and management of farmland and its surrounding environment.
Pollination Services Society of Japan is established to conduct pollination service researches that integrate basic and applied sciences and promote sustainable pollination services. Although our ultimate goal is to maintain or improve pollination services for agricultural crops, we also aim at conservation of pollinator populations and understanding of interaction between wild plants and pollinators as essential backgrounds for our goal.