Restoring an ecosystem service to degraded landscapes: Native bees and crop pollination

Ecosystem services are critical to human survival; managing ecosystems for services could also provide important benefits for biodiversity. Unfortunately, we seldom understand the ecology of these services well enough to manage them. Pollination services are necessary for 15-30% of our food supply, and are comparatively well-understood relative to other ecosystem services. We propose to synthesize data on bee populations, pollinator communities and pollination services across agro-natural landscapes, in order to: (1) develop models of the persistence of populations, communities and pollination function at the landscape scale; (2) design an experiment to restore and monitor pollination function in agro-natural landscapes, replicated across sites, landscapes and regions; and (3) extend this example to create a general, conceptual framework for analyzing and managing ecosystem services. This work will improve our ability to manage agricultural lands, which occupy 38% of terrestrial area, with benefits for food security, human health and biodiversity.