Spatial patterns and climatic associations of pollination demand, habitat-based supply, and pollination-dependent production in South Korea

Abstract

Pollination is a critical ecosystem service for agricultural productivity, yet climate change and intensification increasingly destabilize its delivery. Despite its importance, pollination demand, pollination-dependent production, and habitat-based supply are rarely assessed through an integrated framework. This study develops spatial indicators representing these components across 17 regions in South Korea from 2016 to 2022. The pollination demand indicator and the pollination-dependent production indicator were quantified using linear mixed-effects models relating standardized cultivation area and yield, respectively, to crop-specific pollinator dependence. The habitat-based supply indicator was estimated using the InVEST Crop Pollination model. Relationships among indicators and their associations with regional climatic and geographic variables were examined using Spearman's rank correlation analysis. Results showed a strong but imperfect association between pollination-dependent production and pollination demand indicators (ρ = 0.87, p < 0.001), indicating that the relative cultivation orientation toward pollinator-dependent crops was not uniformly associated with production responses across regions. Climatic variables were more strongly associated with the pollination-dependent production indicator than with the habitat-based supply indicator. The production indicator showed stronger associations with temperature-related gradients than the pollination demand indicator, with positive correlations with latitude (ρ = 0.76, p < 0.001) and negative correlations with mean annual temperature (ρ = −0.71, p < 0.01). Furthermore, the habitat-based supply indicator showed only partial correspondence with the pollination demand indicator (ρ = 0.54, p < 0.05) and marginal correlation with the pollination-dependent production indicator (ρ = 0.42, p < 0.1), suggesting that potential habitat-based supply does not fully correspond to regional variation in the pollination-dependent production indicator across latitudinal and temperature gradients. These findings suggest that habitat-based supply alone does not fully correspond to regional variation in the pollination-dependent production indicator, while climatic conditions provide additional explanatory context beyond habitat-based supply potential. This study demonstrates the importance of explicitly distinguishing among the pollination demand indicator, the habitat-based supply indicator, and the pollination-dependent production indicator, and provides an integrated indicator framework for comparative regional assessment under climatic gradients.