Print PageWildland habitat provides pollination services to agriculture, and meeting pollination needs is a serious concern for a majority of California’s specialty crops. Despite extensive research demonstrating the importance of landscape ecology to pollination services at the field level and calculating the economic value of these services at national or global levels, few studies have integrated spatial information into economic valuation of pollination services. Here we utilize field-scale data on wild bee abundances with regional-scale geospatial data to map and estimate the pollination service value of wild bee pollinators to California agriculture.
Results/Conclusions
We found the value of pollination services from wild bees to be between $937 million and $2.6 billion per year, comprising over a third of the total pollination service value provided jointly by wild and managed bees to farms. Framing pollination service value in a spatially-explicit manner will help identify priority areas for conservation and can guide land-use decisions to better manage this vital ecosystem service.
