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Oral Presentation
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Student Poster Display Competition

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Student Competition

Student

Grad Poster Competition: P-IE, Honey Bee and Native Pollinator Ecology

The buzz around ecovoltaics: Co-locating pollinator habitat with solar energy infrastructure

Monday, November 10, 2025
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM Pacific
Location: Exhibit Hall A-A1, OCC
Oral Presentation Student Competition
Native bees are declining across the U.S. due to a multitude of factors (Wagner et al. 2021). While the drivers of these declines can interact to exacerbate losses, conservation efforts have largely focused on habitat creation to offset these population declines. Although high-quality habitat can rescue native bees from deleterious effects (Grab et al. 2019), finding suitable locations for habitat restoration can be difficult, particularly in agriculture-dominated landscapes. Solar energy infrastructure, however, is rapidly expanding, and stakeholder groups – including federal regulators, industry, and farming communities – have become increasingly interested in co-locating conservation habitat with these energy facilities, also called “ecovoltaics”. Preliminary research indicates that pairing habitat with infrastructure may enhance local insect communities (Dolezal et al. 2021; Walston et al. 2022). However, given the novelty of this approach, questions remain as to the viability of ecovoltaics in different ecoregions and across larger solar facilities. This research investigated the establishment of pollinator habitat in four large-scale (>20 hectares) newly established solar facilities in Indiana and Illinois. Early data analyses suggest that facilities seeded with pollinator habitat do provide benefits to native bee communities; ANOVA results indicate that pollinator habitat in these facilities have higher abundances of bees than agriculture (p = 0.005) and traditional turfgrass (p = 0.014). Shannon-Wiener diversity indices, however, suggest that there is no difference in bee diversity between these habitat types. This research adds to evidence that this new field of ecovoltaics can be beneficial, resulting in a win-win for conservation and renewable energy production.