Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and inform management actions. Here, we present CropPol, a dynamic, open, and global database on crop pollination. It contains measurements recorded from 202 crop studies, covering 3,394 field observations, 2,552 yield measurements (i.e., berry mass, number of fruits, and fruit density [kg/ha], among others), and 47,752 insect records from 48 commercial crops distributed around the globe. CropPol comprises 32 of the 87 leading global crops and commodities that are pollinator dependent. Malus domestica is the most represented crop (32 studies), followed by Brassica napus (22 studies), Vaccinium corymbosum (13 studies), and Citrullus lanatus (12 studies). The most abundant pollinator guilds recorded are honey bees (34.22% counts), bumblebees (19.19%), flies other than Syrphidae and Bombyliidae (13.18%), other wild bees (13.13%), beetles (10.97%), Syrphidae (4.87%), and Bombyliidae (0.05%). Locations comprise 34 countries distributed among Europe (76 studies), North America (60), Latin America and the Caribbean (29), Asia (20), Oceania (10), and Africa (7). Sampling spans three decades and is concentrated on 2001–2005 (21 studies), 2006–2010 (40), 2011–2015 (88), and 2016–2020 (50). This is the most comprehensive open global data set on measurements of crop flower visitors, crop pollinators and pollination to date, and we encourage researchers to add more datasets to this database in the future. This data set is released for non‐commercial use only. Credits should be given to this paper (i.e., proper citation), and the products generated with this database should be shared under the same license terms (CC BY‐NC‐SA).

Deforestation and forest fragmentation are contributing to declines in crop pollinator populations worldwide. Several studies have examined the impact of forest proximity on plant pollination ecology, but concentrated on single crop species. However, it can be more informative to investigate multiple crop and pollinator species in a community, because different pollinator groups may respond differently to forest distance. We evaluated flower visitor diversity, visitation frequency, and fruit set for three crop species (rambutan, durian and mango) in 10 pairs of mixed fruit orchards. Each pair consisted of one orchard near to (< 1 km) and one orchard far from (> 7 km) the forest edge. Rambutan fruit set was significantly influenced by distance to forest. The main visitors of rambutan flowers were stingless bees. In contrast, the dominant visitors to durian and mango flowers were nectarivorous bats and flies, respectively, and the fruit set of these crops were not significantly influenced by distance to forest. However, durian fruit set was negatively affected by distance to the nearest cave inhabited by nectarivorous bats. This study demonstrates that both caves and forests can be important pollinator sources for agricultural crops, and that the dispersal success of pollinators is related to isolation from source habitats. Maintaining forest patches and limestone karsts may provide stepping stones across fragmented landscapes, and attract greater numbers of pollinators to agricultural areas.

Stingless bees are vital pollinators for both wild and crop plants, yet their communities have been affected and altered by anthropogenic land-use change. Additionally, few studies have directly addressed the consequences of land-use change for meliponines, and knowledge on how their communities change across gradients in surrounding landscape cover remains scarce. Here, we examine both how local and landscape-level compositions as well as forest proximity affect both meliponine species richness and abundance together with pollination networks across 30 mixed fruit orchards in Southern Thailand. The results reveal that most landscape-level factors significantly influenced both stingless bee richness and abundance. Surrounding forest cover has a strong positive direct effect on both factors, while agricultural and urbanized cover generally reduced both bee abundance and diversity. In the local habitat, there is a significant interaction between orchard size and floral richness with stingless bee richness. We also found that pollinator specialization in pollination networks decreased when the distance to the forest patch increased. Both local and landscape factors thus influenced meliponine assemblages, particularly the forest patches surrounding an orchard, which potentially act as a key reservoir for stingless bees and other pollinator taxa. Preservation of forest patches can protect the permanent nesting and foraging habitat of various pollinator taxa, resulting in high visitation for crop and wild plants.

Introduction: Most global biodiversity is in developing economies. Decades of capacity building should have built sufficient in-country capacity to develop biodiversity baselines; yet has effort provided the expertise to build these baselines?Methods: Grants and access to research opportunities are often linked to success in publishing, with the H-index providing the main metric of academic success. Recent compilations of “Top Researchers in Ecology and Evolution” included 5,419 researchers, but where these researchers are and how representative they are has not been well studied. We explored the global distribution of “Top Researchers in Ecology and Evolution” and explored the representation of Women, non-Caucasians, and non-Caucasian women, as well as the representation of “local” top researchers in different regions.Results: Over half Top Researchers in Ecology and Evolution are from just three countries (United States, United Kingdom, and Australia), and 83% come from 12 higher-income countries. Even in lower-income economies the majority of the few “high impact” researchers are originally from higher-income economies. Only China had a high proportion of their high-impact non-Caucasian researchers, with the majority of researchers coming from that region. Women were also underrepresented across the globe, only three countries had more than 20% of top-performing ecologists being female.Discussion: Ultimately, despite decades of capacity building, we are still failing to build in-country capacity for research or to provide sufficient support for female ecologists to publish and lead the field. Here we discuss why these issues persist, and how we might improve representation and access to opportunity and support for all groups, and provide the analysis needed to provide solutions to global challenges in biodiversity conservation, which require diverse representation to develop effective, and nuanced solutions.

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α‐diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e., γ‐diversity), either due to reduced β‐diversity amplifying diversity loss or increased β‐diversity dampening diversity loss. Additionally, studies often focus on taxonomic diversity, while other important biodiversity components, including phylogenetic diversity, can exhibit differential responses. Here, we evaluated how agricultural and urban land use alters the taxonomic and phylogenetic α‐, β‐, and γ‐diversity of an important pollinator taxon—bees. Using a multicontinental dataset of 3117 bee assemblages from 157 studies, we found that taxonomic α‐diversity was reduced by 16%–18% in both agricultural and urban habitats relative to natural habitats. Phylogenetic α‐diversity was decreased by 11%–12% in agricultural and urban habitats. Compared with natural habitats, taxonomic and phylogenetic β‐diversity increased by 11% and 6% in urban habitats, respectively, but exhibited no systematic change in agricultural habitats. We detected a 22% decline in taxonomic γ‐diversity and a 17% decline in phylogenetic γ‐diversity in agricultural habitats, but γ‐diversity of urban habitats was not significantly different from natural habitats. These findings highlight the threat of agricultural expansions to large‐scale bee diversity due to systematic γ‐diversity decline. In addition, while both urbanization and agriculture lead to consistent declines in α‐diversity, their impacts on β‐ or γ‐diversity vary, highlighting the need to study the effects of land use change at multiple scales.