UMD Professor Receives $650K USDA Grant to Study Landscape Management for Pollinator Habitats

Pollinators like managed honey bees and wild insects are critical for agriculture, especially for high-value crops like many fruits and vegetables. However, habitat loss and climate change threaten pollinators and food security. To tackle these challenges, Professor Erik Lichtenberg from the University of Maryland’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics has been awarded a three-year, $650,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to explore strategies for managing landscapes to support pollinator habitats.

“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. The goal of our project is to understand and quantify the tradeoffs involved in maintaining pollination services and how they vary from place to place.”

According to Lichtenberg, the price of maintaining pollinators is the cost of setting aside land to serve as habitat for them, which means forgoing the value of the crops that could be grown or the structures that could be built on that land. As people convert more of that wild land to managed uses, the amount of habitat available shrinks, which means that farmers must rely more on managed pollinators like honey bees for pollination services. That introduces other vulnerabilities, such the potential for Colony Collapse Disorder, which threatens the resilience of our food production system. 

As a collaborative effort with Dr. Kathy Baylis of UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Geography and Dr. Elinor Lichtenberg of the University of North Texas, the project will draw insights from both pollination ecology and geography. The research will focus on assessing the economic value of pollination services provided by both wild and managed pollinators while also determining how much land should be set aside as wild pollinator habitat in farming areas. The team will study how both the value of pollination services and efficient levels of wild 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 renting managed pollinators like honey bees from 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, they aim to develop methods that will help policymakers and agricultural professionals to manage landscapes to ensure the sustainability of pollination services over the long term. This project is critical to safeguarding pollination services' resilience and ensuring agriculture's sustainability in the U.S. and beyond amidst environmental changes.