COS 89-3
Intensive agriculture limits pollination services delivery and crop productivity across France

Wednesday, August 13, 2014: 2:10 PM
Bondi, Sheraton Hotel
Nicolas Deguines, UMR 7204 CESCO Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France
Clémentine Jono, UMR 7204 CESCO Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France
Mathilde Baude, University of Bristol, Université d'Orléans
Mickaël Henry, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
Romain Julliard, Umr 7204, UMR 7204 CESCO Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France
Colin Fontaine, +33 1 40 79 30 81, France
Background/Question/Methods

Unprecedented growth in human populations has required the intensification of agriculture to enhance crop productivity, but this was achieved at a major cost to biodiversity. There is abundant local-scale evidence that both pollinator diversity and pollination services decrease with increasing agricultural intensification. This raises concerns regarding food security, as two-thirds of the world’s major food crops are pollinator-dependent. Whether such local findings scale up and affect crop production over larger scales is still being debated.

Results/Conclusions

Here, we analyzed a country-wide dataset of the 54 major crops in France produced over the past two decades and found that benefits of agricultural intensification decrease with increasing pollinator dependence, to the extent that intensification failed to increase the yield of pollinator-dependent crops and decreased the stability of their yield over time. This indicates that benefits from agricultural intensification may be offset by reductions in pollination services, and supports the need for an ecological intensification of agriculture through optimization of ecosystem services.