Pollinators in agricultural landscapes suffer from an increasingly intensive agriculture and loss of semi-natural habitat, which has resulted in lack of flower resources. To support pollinators, flower plantings have been suggested as a promising conservation action, and flower plantings have indeed been found to increase both abundances and diversity of several pollinator groups. However, the knowledge is still limited about how well different flower mixes establishes in different planting contexts (e.g. soil type, moisture, shade/sun exposed areas), how these contexts can affect flowering phenology and hence which pollinator species that are supported.
In Sweden, a new agricultural policy (implemented from EU´s Common Agricultural Policy 2023-2027) has been implemented that promotes flower plantings. It is a voluntary choice for farmers; however, it is an attractive choice since the planting of flower mixtures in set-aside land (in contrast to no planting) reduces the amount of land farmers need to take out of production. The flower planting project “Hela Skåne blommar” and “Hela Sverige blommar”, run by Hushållningssällskapet (https://hushallningssallskapet.se/forskning-utveckling/hela-sverige-blommar/), helps farmers with flower mixtures and in 2022 they already involved 225 farmers in Skåne and 800 in Sweden, and covered altogether 2 750 ha farmland.
Despite the large scale of the flower plantings, there has been no thorough evaluation of which factors that impact establishing rates or the visiting pollinator community. In this project, you will work together with researchers and stakeholders (Hushållningssällskapet) to evaluate how different seed mixtures establishes and their flowering phenology in different contexts, and which pollinators that visit the flower plantings in different replicated setups. The time and scale of the project and the specific research question can be modified depending on your interest and if the project is a BSc or MSc project. Fieldwork will involve plant and insect surveys and can be conducted during the flowering of the different seed mixtures (June – August) in favourable weather conditions, or later in autumn or next spring depending on the specific research question.
Are you interested? Please contact:
Ulrika Samnegård ulrika.samnegard@biol.lu.se or
Maj Rundlöf maj.rundlof@biol.lu.se