Dara A Stanley

• Lecturer at University College Dublin

Highlights • Environmental sustainability is increasingly important but difficult to quantify. • Composite indicators were used to measure sustainability of forest use. • Scenario analysis showed improved sustainability by changing harvesting practices. • Some positive attitudes to forest and its management correlated with sustainability. • Ind...

Miombo woodland is the most widespread dry forest type in southern-central Africa, covering an area of ca2.7 million km2 and spanning seven countries. Despite being a globally significant carbon sink and centre of plant biodiversity, which supports over 65 million livelihoods and provides vital ecosystem goods and services, the ecology of miombo wo...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield–related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield–related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance...

How insects promote crop pollination remains poorly understood in terms of the contribution of functional trait differences between species. We used meta-analyses to test for correlations between community abundance, species richness and functional trait metrics with oilseed rape yield, a globally important crop. While overall abundance is consiste...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by few abundant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 crop systems, we partition the relative importance of abundance and s...

Fig. S1. Aerial image of study location. Appendix S1. Rationale for choosing thiamethoxam exposure levels. Appendix S2. RFID data manipulation. Appendix S3. Homing data filtering. Appendix S4. Effect sizes and confidence intervals of colony growth & homing data. Appendix S5. Acute homing experiment data and results.

1. Proboscis length has been proposed as a key dimension of plant pollination niches, but this niche space has not previously been explored at regional and global scales for any pollination system. Hawkmoths are ideal organisms for exploring pollinator niches as they are important pollinators in most of the biodiverse regions of the earth and vary...

Explosive pollen release is documented in many plant families, including the Fabaceae. Desmodium setigerum E. Mey (Fabaceae) is a perennial herb with single trip explosive pollen release found in eastern Africa, and the unique ability to reverse floral colour change if insufficient pollination has occurred. However, little else is known about the p...

Lay Summary

Table S1. Sequences and flower handling times (in seconds) of the first 30 floral choices for all foragers exposed to control (a) or pesticide (10 ppb thiamethoxam) (b) treatments; n = the total number of flowers visited in the foraging bout. Light grey represents visits to Lotus corniculatus, and dark grey represents visits to Trifolium repens.

The ability to forage and return home is essential to the success of bees as both foragers and pollinators. Pesticide exposure may cause behavioural changes that interfere with these processes, with consequences for colony persistence and delivery of pollination services. We investigated the impact of chronic exposure (5–43 days) to field‐realistic...

Insect pollinators are essential for both the production of a large proportion of world crops and the health of natural ecosystems. As important pollinators, bumblebees must learn to forage on flowers to feed both themselves and provision their colonies. Increased use of pesticides has caused concern over sublethal effects on bees, such as impacts...

Significance Many of the world’s crops are pollinated by insects, and bees are often assumed to be the most important pollinators. To our knowledge, our study is the first quantitative evaluation of the relative contribution of non-bee pollinators to global pollinator-dependent crops. Across 39 studies we show that insects other than bees are effic...

Recent concern over global pollinator declines has led to considerable research on the effects of pesticides on bees. Although pesticides are typically not encountered at lethal levels in the field, there is growing evidence indicating that exposure to field-realistic levels can have sublethal effects on bees, affecting their foraging behaviour, ho...

Bumblebees are exposed to pesticides applied for crop protection while foraging on treated plants, with increasing evidence suggesting that this sublethal exposure has implications for pollinator declines. The challenges of navigating and learning to manipulate many different flowers underline the critical role learning plays for the foraging succe...

Pollinating insects are not only important in wild plant pollination, but also in the production of a large number of crops. Oilseed rape production is increasing globally due to demands for biofuels which may have impacts on pollinating insects which visit the crop and on the pollination services delivered to co-flowering wild plants. In this stud...

Pollinators are beneficial for many wild and crop plants. As a mass-flowering crop, oilseed rape has received much focus in terms of its pollination requirements but despite a threefold increase in area of cultivation of this crop in Ireland over the past 5 years, little is known about its pollination here. We surveyed the flower visiting insects f...

The Bombus sensu stricto species complex is a widespread group of cryptic bumblebee species which are important pollinators of many crops and wild plants. These cryptic species have, until now, largely been grouped together in ecological studies, and so little is known about their individual colony densities, foraging ranges or habitat requirements...

The SIMBIOSYS Project investigated the impacts that human activity have on biodiversity and ecological functioning, and the associated benefits of biodiversity to human society, that is, ecosystem services. Three expanding sectors of enterprise were addressed in the project: (i) the cultivation of bioenergy crops; (ii) the landscaping of road corri...

Global declines in pollinating insects have been linked with agricultural intensification and land‐use change. Increased production of novel crops for bioenergy is causing changes in agricultural practice, but the effects on different pollinating taxa have not yet been quantified. However, the major pollinating groups (social bees, solitary bees, h...

The recent growth in bioenergy crop cultivation, stimulated by the need to implement measures to reduce net CO2 emissions, is driving major land-use changes with consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Although the type of bioenergy crop and its associated management is likely to affect biodiversity at the local (field) scale...

One major characteristic of invasive alien species is their occurrence at high abundances in their new habitat. Flowering invasive plant species that are visited by native insects and overlap with native plant species in their pollinators may facilitate or disrupt native flower visitation and fertilisation by forming large, dense populations with h...

Flowers act as "sensory billboards" with multiple signals (color, morphology, odor) attracting and manipulating potential pollinators. Many use changing signals as indicators that visitation and/or pollination have occurred). Floral color change is commonly used to transmit this information (often correlated with reduced nectar reward) and can be s...