Projects
SEPPI – Standardized European monitoring of Plant-Pollinator Interactions
Megvalósítás alatt lévő/Futó projekt
Summary:
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.
A 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.
Main objectives:
• SEPPI aims to develop and test protocols for automated monitoring pollinators and pollination and to upscale the approach across Europe.
• Optimize the protocol to meet the requirements of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV) in EuropaBON and Standard Observation in eLTER, and standard methodology for national monitoring programs.
• SEPPI aims to demonstrate the scalability and sustainability of the automated methods.
Main activities:
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.
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.
SEPPI will quantify the implementation costs for equipment and labour and in each revision of the protocol will seek ways to reduce these costs.
