Dataset Information

No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline.

ABSTRACT: Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News Index developed by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to track news attention to pollinator topics in nearly 25 million news items published by two American national newspapers and four international wire services over the past four decades. We found vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics relative to coverage of climate change, which we use as a comparison topic. In the most recent subset of ?10 million stories published from 2007 to 2019, 1.39% (137,086 stories) refer to climate change/global warming while only 0.02% (1,780) refer to pollinator populations in all contexts, and just 0.007% (679) refer to pollinator declines. Substantial increases in news attention were detectable only in US national newspapers. We also find that, while climate change stories appear primarily in newspaper "front sections," pollinator population stories remain largely marginalized in "science" and "back section" reports. At the same time, news reports about pollinator populations increasingly link the issue to climate change, which might ultimately help raise public awareness to effect needed policy changes.

SUBMITTER: Althaus SL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7812767 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline.

Althaus Scott L SL Berenbaum May R MR Jordan Jenna J Shalmon Dan A DA

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20210101 2

Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News ...[more]

PMID: 33431567

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Project description:Pollination is a key component in agricultural food production and ecosystem maintenance, with plant-pollinator interactions an important research theme in ecological and evolutionary studies. Natural history collections provide unique access to samples collected at different spatial and temporal scales. Identification of the plant origins of pollen trapped on the bodies of pollinators in these collections provides insight into historic plant communities and pollinators' preferred floral taxa. In this study, pollen was sampled from Megachile venusta Smith bees from the National Collection of Insects, South Africa, spanning 93 years. Three barcode regions, the internal transcribed spacer 1 and 2 (ITS1 and ITS2) and ribulose-1,5-biphosphate carboxylase (rbcL), were sequenced from mixed pollen samples using a next-generation sequencing approach (MiSeq, Illumina). Sequenced reads were compared to sequence reference databases that were generated by extracting sequence and taxonomic data from GenBank. ITS1 and ITS2 were amplified successfully across all (or most) samples, while rbcL performed inconsistently. Age of sample had no impact on sequencing success. Plant classification was more informative using ITS2 than ITS1 barcode data. This study also highlights the need for comprehensive reference databases as limited local plant sequence representation in reference databases resulted in higher-level taxon classifications being more confidently interpreted. The results showed that small, insect-carried pollen samples from historic bee specimens collected from as early as 1914 can be used to obtain pollen metabarcodes. DNA metabarcoding of mixed origin pollen samples provided a faster, more accurate method of determining pollen provenance, without the need for expert palynologists. The use of historic collections to sample pollen directly from pollinators provided additional value to these collections. Sampling pollen from historic collections can potentially provide the spatial and temporal scales for investigations into changes in plant community structure or pollinator floral choice in the face of global climate change.

Project description:A generalist pollination system may be characterized through the interaction of a plant species with two or more functional groups of pollinators. The spatiotemporal variation of the most effective pollinator is the factor most frequently advocated to explain the emergence and maintenance of generalist pollination systems. There are few studies merging variation in floral visitor assemblages and the efficacy of pollination by different functional groups. Thus, there are gaps in our knowledge about the variation in time of pollinator efficacy and frequency of generalist species. In this study, we evaluated the pollination efficacy of the floral visitors of Edmundoa lindenii (Bromeliaceae) and their frequency of visits across four reproductive events. We analyzed the frequency of the three groups of floral visitors (large bees, small bees, and hummingbirds) through focal observations in the reproductive events of 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. We evaluated the pollination efficacy (fecundity after one visit) through selective exposure treatments and the breeding system by manual pollinations. We tested if the reproductive success after natural pollination varied between the reproductive events and also calculated the pollen limitation index. E. lindenii is a self-incompatible and parthenocarpic species, requiring the action of pollinators for sexual reproduction. Hummingbirds had higher efficacy than large bees and small bees acted only as pollen larcenists. The relative frequency of the groups of floral visitors varied between the reproductive events. Pollen limitation has occurred only in the reproductive event of 2017, when visits by hummingbirds were scarce and reproductive success after natural pollination was the lowest. We conclude that hummingbirds and large bees were the main and the secondary pollinators of E. lindenii, respectively, and that temporal variations in the pollinator assemblages had effects on its reproductive success. Despite their lower pollination efficacy, large bees ensured seed set when hummingbirds failed. Thus, we provide evidence that variable pollination environments may favor generalization, even under differential effectiveness of pollinator groups if secondary pollinators provide reproductive assurance.

Dataset Information

No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline.

Publications

No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline.

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