IPM Colloquium: Plant-pollinators across space and time

Prof. Tiffany Knight (iDiv / UFZ Leipzig) will give the next talk of the IPM-Colloquium

Abstract:

There will be dramatic changes in climate and more pressure in the future to produce renewable resources such as food, fodder and bioenergy. It is important that decisions for management of our natural resources are based on the best available science. To achieve this, ecologists need to get much better at synthesizing our knowledge of how drivers influence ecosystems and forecasting scenarios for future land management. My research focuses on the specific topic of plant-pollinator interactions and the ecosystem service of pollination.

The processes that will be involved in forecasting pollination depend the time scale. In the short-term, processes such as phylogeny, abundance, phenology, and trait matching are important, whereas in the longer-term, processes such as climate, population dynamics, dispersal, extinction and evolution are important. In long-term empirical studies, extinctions are non-random, with certain clades of species being more vulnerable. A general understanding of the effects of drivers on plant-pollinator interaction networks is currently challenged by differences across study in taxonomic, spatial and temporal grains as well as methodology. New technologies in hardware, machine learning and computer vision will allow for more standardized monitoring at broader spatio-temporal scales than was previously possible. However, these might not capture several important aspects of pollinator biodiversity.