October 17, 2023
13h
D.262, Kellner building
The worldwide concern over the decline of pollinators needs plans for the conservation of this pollination ecosystem service. National and regional plans first require a comprehensive assessment of the abundance and diversity of insect pollinators and of their floral resources, as well as an in-depth understanding of the dynamics and resilience of plant-pollinator networks. However, the monitoring of those networks involves a lot of time and human resources. Thus, the project aims to develop a replicable method to measure the interactions between entomophilous plants and wild bees in Wallonia. This method is based on citizen sciences and will lead to a periodic monitoring of floral resources in calcareous grasslands, coupled with quantitative observations of plant-bees interactions. However, the true challenge lies in reliability of volunteer’s capacity to perform the right identifications on the field. With enough data and an adequate taxonomic resolution, we aim to identify conditions of stability and resilience for these networks according to the management of calcareous grassland in the region, to in the end, find out if we can improve the situation in collaboration with natural reserves.