BRS Teja Tscharntke: How landscape heterogeneity shapes bee diversity and crop pollination

host: IBioS (contact Claire Kremen)

Title talk: How landscape heterogeneity shapes bee diversity and crop pollination

Abstract: Wild bees provide essential pollination services by improving yields of many crops. Although the demand for pollination services is increasing, land-use intensification and expansion is increasingly disrupting plant-pollinator interactions. Harnessing landscape configurational and compositional heterogeneity plays a vital role for sustaining bee populations, as the species pool on the landscape level determines local patterns and processes. Maintaining bee diversity in agricultural landscapes allows for response diversity to Global Change contributing to sustaining yields. Reducing field size, intercropping and restoring natural habitat enhance floral and nesting resources of bees and further dispersal across landscapes. Crop pollination is a major ecosystem service and benefits three quarters of the main crops globally, but still, only a small minority of bee species is involved. Hence, wild bee conservation cannot focus on only biodiversity-friendly farming, but needs a broader perspective on global habitat protection. 

Short biography: Teja Tscharntke is a Professor of Agroecology at the University of Göttingen, Germany, since 1993. He completed his Master degrees in both sociology and biology at the universities in Marburg and Giessen, did his doctorate in Hamburg and habilitated in Karlsruhe. His main research focuses on landscape perspectives on biodiversity patterns and associated ecosystem services in temperate and tropical regions, especially biological pest control, pollination and quantitative food webs. Further research addresses interdisciplinary studies integrating socio-economic and ecological analyses. He is "Highly Cited Researcher" (annually since 2015) and has been honored 2020 by the Royal Entomological Society (Award for Insect Conservation), the British Ecological Society (Marsh Award for Ecology 2020) and the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Honorary Medal 2021).