The Nagoya Protocol (2010) demonstrated that Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEA) are still achievable. Pollination services are essential for biodiversity, agriculture, ecosystem services and human well-being, but in jeopardy as The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) confirmed. In 2016, thirteen mostly European countries established the Coalition of the Willing on Pollinators. This group of forerunners increased to twenty-one members. Recently, the European Union (EU) decided to join in 2018. What would be necessary to move forward towards a Multilateral Environmental Agreement for pollinator protection during the next three or four Conferences of the Parties (COP) of the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD)? Current approaches for pollinator protection mostly require subsidies or donations, they are not scalable and might limit the number of countries promoting a multilateral agreement.This paper suggests a mix of four strategies and low-cost policy measures across sectors. They would be affordable even for Low Income Countries (LIC), but require addressing certain research gaps to set the stage for policymakers.

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield–related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance of species richness, abundance, and dominance for pollination; biological pest control; and final yields in the context of ongoing land-use change. Pollinator and enemy richness directly supported ecosystem services in addition to and independent of abundance and dominance. Up to 50% of the negative effects of landscape simplification on ecosystem services was due to richness losses of service-providing organisms, with negative consequences for crop yields. Maintaining the biodiversity of ecosystem service providers is therefore vital to sustain the flow of key agroecosystem benefits to society.

Ecosystem services have received increasing attention in life sciences, but only a limited amount of quantitative data are available concerning the ability of weeds to provide these services. Following an expert focus group on this topic, a systematic search for articles displaying evidence of weeds providing regulating ecosystem services was performed, resulting in 129 articles. The most common service found was pest control and the prevailing mechanism was that weeds provide a suitable habitat for natural enemies. Other articles showed that weeds improved soil nutrient content, soil physical properties and crop pollinator abundance. Weeds were found to provide some important ecosystem services for agriculture, but only a small number of studies presented data on crop yield. Experimental approaches are proposed that can: (i) disentangle the benefits obtained from ecosystem services provisioning from the costs due to weed competition and (ii) quantify the contribution of diverse weed communities in reducing crop competition and in providing ecosystem services. Existing vegetation databases can be used to select weed species with functional traits facilitating ecosystem service provisioning while having a lower competitive capacity. However, for services such as pest control, there are hardly any specific plant traits that have been identified and more fundamental research is needed.

The sustainability of agriculture can be improved by integrating management of ecosystem services, such as insect pollination, into farming practices. However, large‐scale adoption of ecosystem services‐based practices in agriculture is lacking, possibly because growers undervalue the benefits of ecosystem services compared to those of conventional management practices. Here we show that, under representative real‐world conditions, pollination and plant quality made similar contributions to marketable seed yield of hybrid leek (Allium porrum). Relative to the median, a 25% improvement of plant quality and pollination increased crop value by an estimated $18 007 and $17 174 ha−1 respectively. Across five crop lines, bumblebees delivered most pollination services, while other wild pollinator groups made less frequent but nevertheless substantial contributions. Honeybees actively managed for pollination services did not make significant contributions. Our results show that wild pollinators are an undervalued agricultural input and managing for enhancing pollinators makes sense economically in high‐revenue insect‐pollinated cropping systems.

Wild animals substantially support crop production by providing ecosystem services, such as pollination and natural pest control. However, the strengths of synergies between ecosystem services and their dependencies on land-use management are largely unknown. Here, we took an experimental approach to test the impact of land-use intensification on both individual and combined pollination and pest control services in coffee production systems at Mount Kilimanjaro. We established a full-factorial pollinator and vertebrate exclosure experiment along a land-use gradient from traditional homegardens (agroforestry systems), shaded coffee plantations to sun coffee plantations (total sample size = 180 coffee bushes). The exclusion of vertebrates led to a reduction in fruit set of ca 9%. Pollinators did not affect fruit set, but significantly increased fruit weight of coffee by an average of 7.4%. We found no significant decline of these ecosystem services along the land-use gradient. Pest control and pollination service were thus complementary, contributing to coffee production by affecting the quantity and quality of a major tropical cash crop across different coffee production systems at Mount Kilimanjaro.

National audience | Pollinators provide a crucial ecosystem service by contributing to the reproduction of many wild plant species as well as crop plant species. Pollinators are facing pressures from multiple drivers leading to their declines with potentially serious implications for human food security and health, as well as ecosystem functions. Concern over pollinator declines has sparked a remarkable increase in studies assessing threats to pollinators and quantifying the impact of their decline on pollination services. Landscape changes have been identified as one of the major drivers of pollinator declines. Thus, understanding the effects of landscape composition and configuration on pollinators is crucial for the prevention of further pollinator loss and to help design strategies to protect pollinators in human‐dominated landscapes. Most previous studies examining the response of pollinator richness, abundance and composition to landscape composition showed a negative effect of the proportion of agricultural land. Landscape configuration can also play an important role: decreased patch size and reduced connectivity of landscape elements have been identified as important drivers of species richness declines. However, studies assessing the effects of landscape characteristics over time, even within a year, are less common. Furthermore, the majority of existing literature focuses on specific hymenopteran groups, but there is a lack of information on the effect of landscape on non‐bee taxa and plant-pollinator interactions. Here, we investigated the response of pollinator communities to landscape composition and configuration. To capture intra-annual variability of plant-pollinator interactions, we surveyed both pollinators (honeybees, wild bees, bumblebees, syrphids and butterflies) and flowering plants, every 15 days from May to September 2018. Surveys were carried out in 7 grasslands and 7 wet meadows located along the Sélune river, Manche (France). Fields were selected to represent a gradient in landscape heterogeneity.

Policy-makers often need to rely on experts with disparate fields of expertise when making policy choices in complex, multi-faceted, dynamic environments such as those dealing with ecosystem services. For policy-makers wishing to make evidence-based decisions which will best support pollinator abundance and pollination services, one of the problems faced is how to access the information and evidence they need, and how to combine it to formulate and evaluate candidate policies. This is even more complex when multiple factors provide influence in combination. The pressures affecting the survival and pollination capabilities of honey bees (Apis mellifera), wild bees, and other pollinators are well documented, but incomplete. In order to estimate the potential effectiveness of various candidate policy choices, there is an urgent need to quantify the effect of various combinations of factors on the pollination ecosystem service. Using high-quality experimental evidence is the most robust approach, but key aspects of the system may not be amenable to experimentation or may be prohibitive based on cost, time and effort. In such cases, it is possible to obtain the required evidence by using structured expert elicitation, a method for quantitatively characterizing the state of knowledge about an uncertain quantity. Here we report and discuss the outputs of the novel use of a structured expert elicitation, designed to quantify the probability of good pollinator abundance given a variety of weather, disease, and habitat scenarios.

The study on the effect of diversity of pollinator, natural enemies and soil arthropods will also include metaanalytical approaches that draw upon and strengthen existing research. This data will be used to develop predictive and iterative models of response to particular groups and their ecosystem services. The model will then be used to develop improved management interventions for testing and scaling with farming communities. Enhancing genetic resources of soybean and its pre-breeding for soybean improvement programme in India. Implement of GEF project ‘Mainstreaming agro-biodiversity conservation and utilization in agricultural sector to ensure ecosystem services and reduce vulnerability’ across 14 sites in India. Continuation of training programmes in partnership with NBPGR. In vitro and cryopreservation training course, and Genebank Operations and Advanced Learning (GOAL) Master Class to be continued for an all round synergy of the international exposure of Bioversity International and the robust and wide research spread of ICAR.

Background Pollinators are well known for the ecosystem services they provide, and while urban areas are generally perceived as low-quality habitat for most wildlife, these cities often support a surprising degree of pollinator diversity. The current rapid growth of urban areas and concern over global pollinator declines have spurred numerous studies examining pollinator communities in temperate cities, but knowledge about tropical urban pollinators remains scarce. Methods This study investigated the effects of habitat and landscape factors on pollinator richness and abundance in a highly-populated, tropical city: Bangkok, Thailand. We conducted pollinator observations in 52 green areas throughout the city and collected data on patch size, floral abundance, plant richness, location type, and percent vegetation at five spatial scales. Results Of the 18,793 pollinators observed, over 98% were bees. Both patch size and floral abundance generally had positive effects on pollinators, although there was a significant interaction between the two factors; these findings were generally consistent across all focal taxa (Tetragonula stingless bees, Apis honey bees, Xylocopa carpenter bees, and butterflies). Discussion Our results demonstrate the importance of maintaining large green areas in cities, since small green areas supported few pollinators, even when floral resources were abundant. Moreover, most pollinator taxa utilized a variety of location types (e.g., public parks, school campuses, temple grounds), with the exception of butterflies, which preferred parks. Our findings are generally consistent with those of temperate urban studies, but additional studies in the tropics are needed before global patterns can be assessed.

The Brazilian Plant-Pollinator Interactions Network*1 (REBIPP) aims to develop scientific and teaching activities in plant-pollinator interaction. The main goals of the network are to: generate a diagnosis of plant-pollinator interactions in Brazil; integrate knowledge in pollination of natural, agricultural, urban and restored areas; identify knowledge gaps; support public policy guidelines aimed at the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services for pollination and food production; and encourage collaborative studies among REBIPP participants. To achieve these goals the group has resumed and built on previous works in data standard definition done under the auspices of the IABIN-PTN (Etienne Américo et al. 2007) and FAO (Saraiva et al. 2010) projects (Saraiva et al. 2017). The ultimate goal is to standardize the ways data on plant-pollinator interactions are digitized, to facilitate data sharing and aggregation. A database will be built with standardized data from Brazilian researchers members of the network to be used by the national community, and to allow sharing data with data aggregators. To achieve those goals three task groups of specialists with similar interests and background (e.g botanists, zoologists, pollination biologists) have been created. Each group is working on the definition of the terms to describe plants, pollinators and their interactions. The glossary created explains their meaning, trying to map the suggested terms into Darwin Core (DwC) terms, and following the TDWG Standards Documentation Standard*2 in definition. Reaching a consensus on terms and their meaning among members of each group is challenging, since researchers have different views and concerns about which data are important to be included into a standard. That reflects the variety of research questions that underlie different projects and the data they collect. Thus, we ended up having a long list of terms, many of them useful only in very specialized research protocols and experiments, sometimes rarely collected or measured. Nevertheless we opted to maintain a very comprehensive set of terms, so that a large number of researchers feel that the standard meets their needs and that the databases based on it are a suitable place to store their data, thus encouraging the adoption of the data standard. An update of the work will soon be available at REBIPP website and will be open for comments and contributions. This proposal of a data standard is also being discussed within the TDWG Biological Interaction Data Interest Group*3 in order to propose an international standard for species interaction data. The importance of interaction data for guiding conservation practices and ecosystem services provision management has led to the proposal of defining Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) related to biological interactions. Essential Biodiversity Variables (Pereira et al. 2013) were developed to identify key measurements that are required to monitoring biodiversity change. EBVs act as intermediate abstract layer between primary observations (raw data) and indicators (Niemeijer 2002). Five EBV classes have been defined in an initial stage: genetic composition, species populations, species traits, community composition, ecosystem function and ecosystem structure. Each EBV class defines a list of candidate EBVs for biodiversity change monitoring (Fig. 1). Consequently, digitalization of such data and making them available online are essential. Differences in sampling protocols may affect data scalability across space and time, hence imposing barriers to the full use of primary data and EBVs calculation (Henry et al. 2008). Thus, common protocols and methods should be adopted as the most straightforward approach to promote integration of collected data and to allow calculation of EBVs (Jürgens et al. 2011). Recently a Workshop was held by GLOBIS B*4 (GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research) to discuss Species Interactions EBVs (February, 26-28, Bari, Italy). Plant-pollinator interactions deserved a lot of attention and REBIPP's work was presented there. As an outcome we expect to define specific EBVs for interactions, and use plant-pollinators as an example, considering pairwise interactions as well as interaction network related variables. The terms in the plant-pollinator data standard under discussion at REBIPP will provide information not only on EBV related with interactions, but also on other four EBV classes: species populations, species traits, community composition, ecosystem function and ecosystem structure. As we said, some EBVs for specific ecosystem functions (e.g. pollination) lay beyond interactions network structures. The EBV 'Species interactions' (EBV class 'Community composition') should incorporate other aspects such as frequency (Vázquez et al. 2005), duration and empirical estimates of interaction strengths (Berlow et al. 2004). Overall, we think the proposed plant-pollinator interaction data standard which is currently being developed by REBIPP will contribute to data aggregation, filling many data gaps and can also provide indicators for long-term monitoring, being an essential source of data for EBVs.