Standardized European monitoring of plant-pollinator interactions

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Tiffany Marie Knight
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532239370

Interactions between plants and pollinators shape how both respond to environmental drivers, and are critical to our food security and for maintaining ecosystem services offered by wild plants. Both EuropaBON and eLTER have stated the need for monitoring of plants, pollinators and their interactions simultaneously and for this monitoring to be as inexpensive and as automated as possible. Such standardized monitoring throughout Europe would allow for trends in pollinators and in the ecosystem service of pollination to be detected in near time, allowing for rapid management interventions. The unanswered scientific question is whether rapid automated methods are capable of detecting trends with the same rigour that is currently possible with traditional methods in pollination ecology. SEPPI aims to develop and optimize the protocol (measurement, data flow, quality control, metadata), create pipelines for image processing, analyses and visualizations, and investigate the scalability and sustainability of automated monitoring. SEPPI will use new, non-lethal technology to capture images of pollinators on flowers in the field using time-lapse cameras and deep learning to identify pollinators. Scientific outputs include quantification of the abundance and diversity of four orders of pollinating insects across space and time and European maps of pollinator trends, as well as quantifying changes plant-pollinator interactions, and the degree to which environmental change alters pollinators through changes in plant communities. Protocols and pipelines will be co-created with the pre-identified stakeholders that will use them: scientists, research site managers, eLTER, EuropaBON and EEA. The developed protocol will be tested in the field sites of the PIs for performance at detecting plant-pollinator interaction change across a variety of ecological gradients, such as land use, restoration, altitude, fragmentation and ecological succession. As pollination ecologists are only recently investigating network responses to each of these gradients, each case study provides a novel contribution to science. Together these case studies allow us to test hypotheses how well automated methods detect changes in interactions across a wide range of biogeographical settings and types of gradients. Thus, SEPPI aims to demonstrate the scalability and sustainability of the automated methods. Local stakeholders, such as eLTER research site managers, will only adopt new protocols if they provide an added benefit, are not too labor intensive, and are affordable. SEPPI will quantify the implementation costs for equipment and labour and in each revision of the protocol will seek ways to reduce these costs. We envision a future in which plants, pollinators and their interactions are monitored every year with minimal costs and high automation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Romania
• Partner Organisation: Academy of Finland (AKA); Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO); Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca (MUR); National Research, Development and Innovation Office; Technology Agency of the Czech Republic; UEFISCDI; Valsts izglītības attīstības aģentūra (VIAA)
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Peter Batary, Ph.D.; Dr. Anu Eskelinen; Dr. Hans Jacquemyn; Professorin Dr. Jana Jersakova; Dr. Viesturs Melecis; Natalia Timus, Ph.D.; Ramona Viterbi, Ph.D.