USDA Grant Funds Investigation of Managing Land to Support Food Security

Pollinators like managed honey bees and wild insects are critical for agriculture, but habitat loss and climate change are harming many species—and threatening food security for people. A University of Maryland researcher will tackle these challenges with support from a three-year, $650,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Professor Erik Lichtenberg of the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics will explore strategies for managing landscapes to support habitats for pollinators, which farmers rely on to raise high-value crops.

“Wild insects like native bees, flies and beetles have historically played key roles in pollinating fruits and vegetables that are important in our diets,” Lichtenberg said. “We have treated those pollination services as if they’ll always be there and always be free. But they’re not free and they may not always be there.”

Maintaining pollinators means accepting the cost of setting aside land to serve as habitat for them, forgoing the value of the crops that could be grown or the structures that could be built on that land, Lichtenberg said. As people develop more wild land, the amount of habitat available shrinks, which means that farmers must rely more on managed pollinators like honey bees—brought to North America from Europe hundreds of years ago. That introduces other vulnerabilities, such the potential for Colony Collapse Disorder, which wipes out beekeepers’ colonies and threatens the resilience of our food production system.

As a collaborative effort with Kathy Baylis of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Elinor Lichtenberg (Erik Lichtenberg’s daughter) of the University of North Texas, the project will draw insights from both pollination ecology and geography. The researchers will assess the economic value of pollination services provided by wild and managed pollinators as well as how much land should be set aside as wild pollinator habitat in farming areas. The team will also study how both the value of pollination services and requirements for pollinator habitat preservation vary geographically.

Lichtenberg and his collaborators will begin by developing a conceptual framework for understanding tradeoffs between setting aside land for wild pollinator habitat and securing services of commercial beekeepers. Then they will utilize a combination of publicly available datasets to quantify land use practices that best support pollinator health and increase agricultural productivity for two model crops (blueberries and watermelon) grown in very different agro-ecological zones in the US.

Through this approach, the researchers aim to develop methods that will help policymakers and agricultural professionals manage landscapes to ensure long-term sustainability of pollination services amid sweeping environmental changes.