Dr Nicholas Balfour and colleagues at Sussex University were recipients of funding from BBKA in 2018 for an unusual and interesting project on building an online data base of pollinator interactions. This is intended to be open access when it becomes active (hopefully later in 2020) so that anyone can search it for any plant and any pollinator. Lockdown has slowed up the completion of this work but the group have managed to prepare a paper for publication and there is a description of the work here.
The Database of Pollinator Interactions (DoPI)
The importance of flower-insect interactions in maintaining global biodiversity, ecosystem resilience and agricultural output is well established. However, significant concerns remain about pollinator and plant populations declines and shrinking distributions. For example, more than 40 British bee, wasp and butterfly species have become extinct in the last two centuries 1. While many potential causes have been identified, the …
