Supervisors: Alice Mauchline and Simon Potts (also John Cussans and Juliet Osborne at Rothamsted Research)
- Pollination is a key ecosystem service that is threatened by agricultural intensification and the biodiversity losses linked to it
- Pollination limitation is where reduced pollination effectiveness leads to a decrease in plant fecundity
- Pollination limitation has been documented in many wild plants; arable plants are shown to be highly susceptible
- This project aims to investigate pollination of wild plants within arable fields, the effect of a number of different growing situations on pollinator efficiency and how this impacts plant fecundity.
OBJECTIVES
- Measure the change in pollinator activity and pollination efficiency with distance to the field edge for two common wild plant species
- Study the impact of apparency on the pollination of isolated individuals
- Compare the pollination of wild-plant individuals in a mass-flowering crop compared to in a cereal crop
- Quantify the relationships between pollination and seed set in contrasting wild plants
- Quantify the impact of the observed changes in pollination efficiency and reproductive output on the long-term sustainability of plant populations
The project will use a combination of manipulative field experiments and surveys of natural populations. The data generated can then be integrated into existing plant population dynamics models to quantify the relationships between pollination and reproduction.
OUTPUTS
This project will provide an assessment of pollination limitation in isolated wild plants in arable fields in different scenarios. This project will contribute to ecological models that make predictions of long term impacts on the sustainability of plant populations in arable fields.
The study is funded by ...
