The time has come for the agricultural community to join together to provide proactive leadership in restoring and expanding populations of managed and native pollinators. The Native Pollinators in Agriculture Project is building and supporting an Agricultural Pollination Alliance through which the agriculture sector can work collaboratively and proactively to establish and protect native pollinator habitat and increase populations of native and managed pollinators. The Alliance will work to gather information, identify priorities, and engage partners and policy makers on the need to address pollination challenges by:
- assessing grower awareness of pollination challenges and opportunities to make greater use of native pollinators for providing pollination services;
- working with government agencies and universities to better document economic benefits and losses; strengthen population assessments; identify and quantify the consequences of pollinator population declines; and publicize “at risk” pollinators, baseline data, and benchmarks for improvement;
- prioritizing challenges and opportunities and developing recommendations for addressing the same;
- identifying research and technology transfer changes;
- informing policy makers about the scope and magnitude of pollination problems and advocating for programs and funding to address these challenges.
You are invited to join the Alliance in exploring this opportunity further. For more information about the Alliance, contact Project Coordinator Ernie Shea at eshea@agpollinators.org.
