Pollinators in agricultural landscapes suffer from an increasingly intensive agriculture and loss of semi-natural habitat, which has resulted in lack of flower resources that provide pollen and nectar. 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 what kind of flower plantings benefit which pollinator species, such as common and rare species.
In Sweden, a new agricultural policy (implemented from EU´s Common Agricultural Policy 2023-2027) has been implemented that promotes flower plantings, but is a voluntary choice for farmers. However, since the choice of planting flower mixtures in farmer’ set-aside land reduces the amount of land farmers need to take out of production, it will be a very attractive choice for many. 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 planting and in 2022 they already involved 225 (in Skåne) and 800 (in Sweden) farmers, and covered altogether 2 750 ha farmland. Despite the large scale of the flower plantings, that will probably increase with the new agricultural policy, there has been no thorough evaluation of which flower species that are most suitable to include in flower plantings to promote pollinators in Skåne and Sweden. This year Hushållningssällskapet will trial ten new plant seed mixtures, which provides an excellent opportunity to study the potential of different mixtures to promote pollinators before they will be used on a larger scale.
in this project, you will work together with stakeholders (Hushållningssällskapet) to evaluate the potential of ten different seed mixtures to support pollinators and other biodiversity. You will e.g. evaluate establishing rates, phenology and visiting insect community of the different mixtures and you will get insights in the different agricultural-biodiversity trade-offs that needs to be considered when plant species mixtures are to be selected. The 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 mainly be conducted during the flowering of the different seed mixtures. The times for field surveys will depend on weather conditions (pollinators like it nice and warm) and flowering phenology of the plant mixtures.
Are you interested? Please contact:
Henrik Smith henrik.smith@biol.lu.se or
Ulrika Samnegård ulrika.samnegard@biol.lu.se