A vulnerability assessment framework for prioritizing pollinator habitat enhancements

Pollinators face steep declines, threatening the sustainability of crop pollination services. Seminatural habitat restoration and wildflower plantings can help to mitigate pollinator declines and are subsidized by agricultural conservation programs, yet management tools to identify where to prioritize pollinator conservation actions are lacking. We present a vulnerability assessment framework to guide management decisions, using pollinator habitat enhancements implemented under the Conservation Reserve Program in the U.S. We investigated if >1.3M instances of pollinator habitat enhancements are being prioritized in structurally simplified landscapes where expected conservation benefits are greatest and in regions where pollination services are most at risk. We showed that many pollinator habitat enhancements are in landscapes where the expected pollinator conservation benefits are highest, suggesting that practice efficacy is high based on landscape context alone. Our spatial models revealed fewer pollinator habitat enhancements in vulnerable areas with higher cover of pollinator-dependent crops and more recent or projected seminatural habitat loss for some conservation programs. Our findings suggest that targeted conservation actions that consider both landscape context and vulnerability could increase the efficacy of conservation investments in the present and increase the potential of conservation programs to ensure the delivery of pollination services in the future. Our vulnerability framework can be scaled to any ecosystem service to optimize initiatives and ensure the sustainable delivery of nature’s contributions to people.