Suchergebnisse

Recent declines in insect pollinators and the increasing dependence on insect pollination in agriculture present major challenges to ensuring future food production. As part of the effort to deal with this challenge, there is a pressing need to understand growers' perceptions with regard to pollinator diversity and crop pollination management. At present, many growers are dependent on domesticated honey bees (Apis mellifera), however, targeted management strategies involving naturally occurring pollinator species might be necessary to ensure future crop pollination. In this study we used semi-structured interviews to explore growers' knowledge about crop pollination and current practices to manage insect pollination in sweet cherry cultivation. Our findings suggest that growers have a clear understanding of the importance of pollination and its determining factors. However, with respect to their current pollination management, growers depend mainly on honey bees and only apply measures to enhance wild pollinator communities to a limited extent. Our study highlights the gap between the growers' perception of the contribution of wild pollinators to crop pollination, and their efforts to manage these species. We conclude that this is due to a lack of communication of recent scientific findings on the contribution of pollinating insects to crop pollination through the information channels that are being used by growers today. It is therefore crucial that scientists, government and other stakeholders work together with growers and communicate scientific evidence as well as practical guidelines to growers.

Despite an improvement of water quality across Europe there are many pollution hotspots for both nitrates and PPPs, mainly due to agricultural activities. The BMPs and MMs to reduce pollution from agriculture are well known, and there are policy instruments in place to ensure drinking water standards, but the current approach has not been efficient enough. Within the H2020 Water Protect project the premise was that there is a need for a multi-actor, participatory approach to tackle the issue from a new angle, and to assess why the uptake of known BMPs and MMs was not better among farmers. Seven "Action Labs" were selected that represent major physical, socio-economical, cultural and farming settings across Europe. A methodology of multi-actor engagement was chosen but with different approaches due to the local context. Initially the level of farmers' awareness about water quality issues was matched to the observed uptake rates of BMPs and MMs. In a second survey barriers hindering the uptake of measures were identified. The first survey revealed a low general awareness on the potential pollution to drinking water sources. Despite this, between 24% to 88% of the surveyed farmers per Action Lab were already voluntarily adopting one quarter of the selected BMPs and MMs. The second survey demonstrated the need to address organisational, legislative, sociological and technical barriers. The lack of coordination between different institutional bodies promoting measures and the financial incentives needed to invest and operate these often-costly measures need to be considered. The multi-actor, participatory approach with its improved awareness and collaboration made it possible to identify the crucial factors for improvement - to build a social acceptance among all actors and communicate the issues and solutions from the start.