Advantages of marketable habitat enhancement plants for pollinator protection notably in low-and middle-income countries.

Abstract

The decline of pollinators is reported worldwide. The most widely promoted protection approach, wildflower strips, is disliked by farmers and therefore often supported by agroecological schemes. They can neither bend pollinator decline in the European Union nor is this approach affordable for the Global South. Wildflower strips address pollinator decline at the level of plant-pollinator networks, while in the Anthropocene, humans are the crucial factor. Therefore, we tested an alternative approach, Farming with Alternative Pollinators (FAP), which focusses on humans' interests, e.g. productivity, income, and pest control as farmers' interests. Based on 31 trials in 233 smallholder fields in four very different agroecosystems with seven main crops and 27 marketable habitat enhancement plants (MHEP) and an ex-post farmer survey in Morocco, we analyzed the potential of MHEP to sustain diverse flower visitors, promote pest control and adoption by farmers. The four agroecosystems are common across the Mediterranean region. MHEP attracted higher diversity and abundance of flower visitors and natural enemies over a prolonged flowering period. MHEP supported pest control by push-pull effects. 68 % of FAP farmers adopted their use. Some MHEP have been identified as best performing both by scientists and farmers, so that in Morocco, the antagonism between scientists requesting pollinator protection and farmers insisting on business requirements has been minimized. We recommend similar multidisciplinary studies for more regions to clarify whether, in the long-term and globally, MHEP and the FAP approach could promote pollinator protection more economically and effectively than wildflower strips and agroecological schemes.