Agricultural specialisation increases the vulnerability of pollination services for smallholder farmers.
Abstract
Smallholder farms make up 84% of all farms worldwide and feed 2 billion people. These farms are heavily reliant on ecosystem services and vulnerable to environmental change, yet under-represented in the ecological literature. The high diversity of crops in these systems makes it challenging to identify and manage the best providers of an ecosystem service, such as the best pollinators to meet the needs of multiple crops. It is also unclear whether ecosystem service requirements change as smallholders transition towards more specialised commercial farming-an increasing trend worldwide. Here, we present a new metric for predicting the species providing ecosystem services in diverse multi-crop farming systems. Working in 10 smallholder villages in rural Nepal, we use this metric to test whether key pollinators, and the management actions that support them, differ based on a farmers' agricultural priority (producing nutritious food to feed the family vs. generating income from cash crops). We also test whether the resilience of pollination services changes as farmers specialise on cash crops. We show that a farmers' agricultural priority can determine the community of pollinators they rely upon. Wild insects including bumblebees, solitary bees and flies provided the majority of the pollination service underpinning nutrient production, while income generation was much more dependent on a single species-the domesticated honeybee