ORCID Profile
0000-0002-6495-428X
Current Organisation
Cornell University
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 17-02-2022
DOI: 10.1002/ECY.3614
Abstract: 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). S ling 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).
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-05-2017
DOI: 10.1111/GCB.13714
Abstract: Agricultural intensification is a leading cause of global bio ersity loss, which can reduce the provisioning of ecosystem services in managed ecosystems. Organic farming and plant ersification are farm management schemes that may mitigate potential ecological harm by increasing species richness and boosting related ecosystem services to agroecosystems. What remains unclear is the extent to which farm management schemes affect bio ersity components other than species richness, and whether impacts differ across spatial scales and landscape contexts. Using a global metadataset, we quantified the effects of organic farming and plant ersification on abundance, local ersity (communities within fields), and regional ersity (communities across fields) of arthropod pollinators, predators, herbivores, and detritivores. Both organic farming and higher in-field plant ersity enhanced arthropod abundance, particularly for rare taxa. This resulted in increased richness but decreased evenness. While these responses were stronger at local relative to regional scales, richness and abundance increased at both scales, and richness on farms embedded in complex relative to simple landscapes. Overall, both organic farming and in-field plant ersification exerted the strongest effects on pollinators and predators, suggesting these management schemes can facilitate ecosystem service providers without augmenting herbivore (pest) populations. Our results suggest that organic farming and plant ersification promote erse arthropod metacommunities that may provide temporal and spatial stability of ecosystem service provisioning. Conserving erse plant and arthropod communities in farming systems therefore requires sustainable practices that operate both within fields and across landscapes.
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 04-03-2013
Abstract: Pollinators such as bees are essential to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. However, despite concerns about a global pollinator crisis, long-term data on the status of bee species are limited. We present a long-term study of relative rates of change for an entire regional bee fauna in the northeastern United States, based on ,000 museum records representing 438 species. Over a 140-y period, aggregate native species richness weakly decreased, but richness declines were significant only for the genus Bombus . Of 187 native species analyzed in idually, only three declined steeply, all of these in the genus Bombus . However, there were large shifts in community composition, as indicated by 56% of species showing significant changes in relative abundance over time. Traits associated with a declining relative abundance include small dietary and phenological breadth and large body size. In addition, species with lower latitudinal range boundaries are increasing in relative abundance, a finding that may represent a response to climate change. We show that despite marked increases in human population density and large changes in anthropogenic land use, aggregate native species richness declines were modest outside of the genus Bombus . At the same time, we find that certain ecological traits are associated with declines in relative abundance. These results should help target conservation efforts focused on maintaining native bee abundance and ersity and therefore the important ecosystems services that they provide.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 23-06-2015
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 17-03-2021
Abstract: While an increasing number of studies indicate that the range, ersity and abundance of many wild pollinators has declined, the global area of pollinator-dependent crops has significantly increased over the last few decades. Crop pollination studies to date have mainly focused on either identifying different guilds pollinating various crops, or on factors driving spatial changes and turnover observed in these communities. The mechanisms driving temporal stability for ecosystem functioning and services, however, remain poorly understood. Our study quantifies temporal variability observed in crop pollinators in 21 different crops across multiple years at a global scale. Using data from 43 studies from six continents, we show that (i) higher pollinator ersity confers greater inter-annual stability in pollinator communities, (ii) temporal variation observed in pollinator abundance is primarily driven by the three-most dominant species, and (iii) crops in tropical regions demonstrate higher inter-annual variability in pollinator species richness than crops in temperate regions. We highlight the importance of recognizing wild pollinator ersity in agricultural landscapes to stabilize pollinator persistence across years to protect both bio ersity and crop pollination services. Short-term agricultural management practices aimed at dominant species for stabilizing pollination services need to be considered alongside longer term conservation goals focussed on maintaining and facilitating bio ersity to confer ecological stability.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 18-10-2018
DOI: 10.1101/411702
Abstract: Inflammatory insults accompanying prematurity provokes diffuse white matter injury (DWMI) which is associated with increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders: pre-term infants have a 10 to 18-fold increased risk of developing autism spectrum disorders, compared to term infants. DWMI is due to maturation arrest in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). Using integrated genome-wide approaches in a validated mouse perinatal model of DWMI, induced by systemic- and neuro-inflammation based on repeated interleukin-1B administrations, we show that neuroinflammation induces limited epigenomic disturbances in OPCs. In contrast, we unravel marked transcriptomic alterations of genes of the immune/inflammatory pathways, which are expressed in unstressed OPCs and physiologically downregulated along OPC maturation. Consistently, we observe that transcription factors of the inflammatory pathways occupy DNA both in unstressed and inflamed OPCs. Thus, rather than altering genome-wide chromatin accessibility, neuroinflammation takes advantage of open chromatin regions and deeply counteracts the stage-dependent downregulation of these active transcriptional programs. Therefore, our study opens new avenues for the future development of targeted approaches to protect preterm brains. ∘ Limited epigenomic impact of inflammation on OPC maturation blockade ∘ Major transcriptomic disturbances take advantage of a primed epigenetic landscape ∘ Proinflammatory genes are active in OPCs and downregulated upon maturation ∘ Neuroinflammation counteracts both this downregulation and maturation in OPCs
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 18-02-2016
DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS10841
Abstract: Nature Communications 6: Article number: 7414 (2015) Published: 16 June 2015 Updated: 18 February 2016. The authors inadvertently omitted Kimiora L. Ward, who managed and contributed data, from the author list. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 2013
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 16-06-2015
DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS8414
Abstract: There is compelling evidence that more erse ecosystems deliver greater benefits to people, and these ecosystem services have become a key argument for bio ersity conservation. However, it is unclear how much bio ersity is needed to deliver ecosystem services in a cost-effective way. Here we show that, while the contribution of wild bees to crop production is significant, service delivery is restricted to a limited subset of all known bee species. Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops. Dominant crop pollinators persist under agricultural expansion and many are easily enhanced by simple conservation measures, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management strategies to promote threatened bees. Conserving the biological ersity of bees therefore requires more than just ecosystem-service-based arguments.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-03-2013
DOI: 10.1111/ELE.12082
Abstract: Bees provide essential pollination services that are potentially affected both by local farm management and the surrounding landscape. To better understand these different factors, we modelled the relative effects of landscape composition (nesting and floral resources within foraging distances), landscape configuration (patch shape, interpatch connectivity and habitat aggregation) and farm management (organic vs. conventional and local-scale field ersity), and their interactions, on wild bee abundance and richness for 39 crop systems globally. Bee abundance and richness were higher in ersified and organic fields and in landscapes comprising more high-quality habitats bee richness on conventional fields with low ersity benefited most from high-quality surrounding land cover. Landscape configuration effects were weak. Bee responses varied slightly by biome. Our synthesis reveals that pollinator persistence will depend on both the maintenance of high-quality habitats around farms and on local management practices that may offset impacts of intensive monoculture agriculture.
No related grants have been discovered for Bryan Danforth.