A view across fields - Interdisciplinary perspectives for bees in agricultural landscapes

Biodiversity conservation must be both functional and sustainable to respond to global environmental change. By modifying environments, humans are critical to this.

However, international policy lacks an appreciation beyond the ´rational´ (ecology and economic) of what motivates or constrains people´s conservation efforts (Fig. 1). We will address this through the lens of pollinator conservation in agricultural systems.

First, we will extend and validate an ecological model to generate systematic predictions of two bee species´ (with contrasting ecologies) reproductive output and pollination services in different landscape contexts.

We will then combine this information with predictors of people´s engagement (e.g. perceptions) in conservation with specific practices costs to provide stakeholders (policymakers and farmers) with robust, generalisable, and holistic recommendations for pollinator conservation.

Furthermore, we integrate ecological and economic perspectives into a validated ecological-economic model to elucidate how landscape-scale management of high-scoring conservation practices can maximise cost-effectiveness for farmers, policymakers and society.

In doing so, we aim to demonstrate how a paradigm shift to an interdisciplinary approach can provide policy-ready solutions to land-use change and ultimately increase engagement in biodiversity conservation.