Progress 02/01/24 to 01/31/25
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this project is growers of specialty fruit crops who depend on insect pollination for agricultural production, crop scouts and other agricultural professionals who provide services for the agricultural community, and academic researchers interested in how to bridge science to practice through translational extension work aided by decision-support tools. During this reporting period, we have convened our stakeholder advisory team once after the second field season to provide an update on the second summer of work, to offer a preview of third year activities, and to obtain feedback on the process. The stakeholder advisory group includes fruit crop growers and agricultural professionals. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In the second year of the project, we hired a field crew including two undergraduates, one recent college graduate, and a high school intern. Our international graduate student, Sumikshya KC from Nepal completed her first field season and will compile the results into her MS thesis. Sumikshya presented a poster at the Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America in Pheonix, AZ in Nov. 2024. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?In addition to the presentation at the Annual ESA conference for Entomological professional studies, we have been actively promoting the WiBee citizen science platform to a broad community through outreach events, trainings and a WiBee newsletter. The newsletter goes out to 1600+ subscribers on an approximately quarterly basis. In this reporting period, our group gave 6 WiBee-related talks to approximately 300 attendees. Garden and Green Living Expo, "WiBee: The Wisconsin Wild Bee App", Madison, WI, February 2025. Midwest Honey Bee Expo, "Where should I put my honey bees? Exploring variation in pesticide contamination, nutritional quality, and diversity of pollen collected by honey bees in Wisconsin landscapes", Waukesha, WI, January 2025 Growing Wisconsin Conference, "Estimating the contribution of wild bees to crop pollination using WiBee, a grower-based app", Hannah Gaines Day and Peter Werts, Wisconsin Dells, WI, January 2025. Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting, "Community-driven pollinator conservation: a case study using No Mow May and the WiBee app", Phoenix, AZ, November 2024. Food and Farm Exploration Center Ag After Hours, "Good Guys, Bad Guys: Protecting pollinators in production agriculture", Plover, WI, June 2024. Sun Prairie Now Mow May Initiative, "10 Actions You Can Take This Year to Help Pollinators", Cindy Burtley, Rose Daily, and Hannah Gaines Day, Sun Prairie Public Library, April 2024. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?In the third year of the project, we will collect the final data needed for objectives 1 and 2. We will work with our collaborators to create management-relevant materials to incorporate into the WiBee app. Finally, we will work with our developer to make updates to the app to address the concerns of our grower community.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
With growing concerns about pollinator declines, fruit and vegetable growers want to know if they can rely on wild bees alone to pollinate their crops. However, we lack sufficient data at the farm-scale to assess this question and there are few tools available for growers to assist them in making pollinator-based decisions on their farms. In this integrated research and extension project, we propose to work with growers and agricultural professionals to develop an innovative pollination management tool that provides crop-specific pollination recommendations, building on the WiBee app, a simple smartphone enabled tool that allows standardized observations of pollinator visitation to flowers. This tool will ultimately benefit farmers of pollinator-dependent crops by providing them with an evidence-based tool for making pollination management decisions. We anticipate that the tool will mainly be used by growers and crop professionals hired to advise growers on crop management. In the second year of this project, we continued collecting data to address objective 1 and making updates and improvements to the functionality of the WiBee app that is used for making pollinator observations. For objective 1 (refining protocols), our research crew, including 3 summer technicians, one high school intern, and 1 graduate student, along with our collaborating crop professionals collected a total of 2,015 five-minute WiBee surveys (168 hours of observation time). This included 688 surveys on apple flowers from 13 farms, 807 surveys on cranberry flowers from 11 farms, and 520 surveys on pumpkin flowers from 7 farms. Once again, honey bees were the most common visitors in apples (68% of visits) and cranberries (79% of visits) but not in pumpkins (only 12% of visits). Wild bees were observed in all crops and were the dominant visitor in pumpkins (79% of visits, primarily the squash bee Eucera (Peponapis) pruinosa). Interestingly, overall visitation rate was much lower in 2024 compared to 2023 in apple and cranberry (57% and 44% decrease respectively) but not in pumpkin (243% increase). This change was driven mainly by changes in honey bee activity and could be related to the drought conditions experienced in 2023. Objective 2 (determining pollination-crop outcomes) was a major focus in the second year of the project and is the focal project for the graduate student on the grant. In 2024, we collected two main types of data at one farm for each crop, single visit pollen deposition and fruit set. Single visit pollen deposition is a measure of how much insects are contributing to pollination in a single visit to a single flower. The field protocol involves putting mesh bags around closed flower buds until the flowers open, then removing the bag and waiting until a single insect has visited the flower. The flower is then brought back to the lab and the total number of grains of pollen are counted. We collected data on 86 single visits in apple, 80 single visits in cranberry, and 53 single visits in pumpkin. In addition, we collected open controls that measure the total amount of pollen deposited in a full day along with the associated closed controls to account for any pollen movement not attributed to an insect. By combining the visitation data collected in objective 1 with the single visit pollen deposition data in objective 2, we will be able to calculate how much pollen we expect should be deposited in a full day. To validate these calculations, we can compare the calculated numbers to the open control data as well as the fruit set data which is a proxy for pollination success. Ultimately, we plan to use this data to calculate an Index of Pollination Success which will help growers understand whether wild bees are providing sufficient pollination services to their farm or not. Objective 3 relates to developing grower-specific features in WiBee and management-relevant materials within and associated with the WiBee app. This will be a focus in the third year of the project. Over the past year we have maintained an open line of communication with our collaborators about the functionality of the app and have worked with our developer to implement updates and improvements in the app. The most recent updates in the current version of WiBee (1.56) allow the users to organize surveys by user group (e.g., research team) and survey location (e.g., farm) and then filter surveys by date, habitat type, plant, location/site, and surveyor. These improvements will give growers a quick and easy way to summarize the pollinator activity on their farm. During the second year of the project, we continued to collect baseline data that we will need in order to develop grower-relevant thresholds of pollination for our focal crops. We also worked closely with our research crew and collaborators to improve the app in order to make it more user friendly and relevant to growers. We now have two years of data that we will use to develop crop-specific protocols (obj. 1) and one year of data to build our pollination index which relates pollinator activity to crop outcomes (obj. 2).
Publications
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Progress 02/01/23 to 01/31/24
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this project is growers of specialty fruit crops who depend on insect pollination for agricultural production, crop scouts and other agricultural professionals who provide services for the agricultural community, and academic researchers interested in how to bridge science to practice through translational extension work aided by decision-support tools. During this reporting period, we have convened our stakeholder advisory team twice, once during the initiation of the project to lay out the objectives and plan of work, and to ask for advice on decision-making processes by agricultural professionals and how our research and extension project can contribute to their work. We met a second time with the advisory team after the first field season to provide an update on the first summer of work, to offer a preview of second year activities, and to obtain feedback on the process. The stakeholder advisory group includes fruit crop growers and agricultural professionals. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In the first year of the project, we hired an all-female field crew including three undergraduates and one recent first-generation college graduate. We also recruited an international graduate student, Sumikshya KC from Nepal to be part of the project. She will be obtaining her MS degree in the Entomology program at the University of Wisconsin. She is being mentored by Drs. Claudio Gratton and Hannah Gaines-Day. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have been actively promoting the WiBee citizen science platform to a diverse set of communities through outreach events, trainings and a WiBee newsletter. The newsletter goes out to 1600+ subscribers on an approximately quarterly basis. In this reporting period, our group gave 5 WiBee-related talks to approximately 100 attendees. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?In the second year of the project, we will continue collecting data for objective 1 and expand our data collection for objective 2 which will be spearheaded by our new graduate student. We will continue to listen to feedback from our collaborators and implement changes to improve the user experience with the app.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
In the first year of this project, we focused on collecting data to address objective 1 as well as making improvements to the functionality of the WiBee app that will be used for pollinator visitation observations. For objective 1 (refining protocols), our research crew including 4 summer technicians along with our collaborating crop professionals collected 1,875 five-minute WiBee surveys including 383 from apple, 903 from cranberry, and 589 from pumpkin. From these data, we found variation in the dominant pollinator visitor to these crops, with honeybees being the dominant pollinators in apple (79% of visitors) and cranberry (84% of visitors) but not in pumpkin (only 7% of visitors). Wild bees were observed in all crops, and they were dominant in pumpkins (primarily the squash bee Peponapis pruinosa). With the abundant observation information collected using WiBee, we were able to develop visitation activity curves during a day, which we found to be different across crops: peak visitation rate in apples was averaged a high of ~7 bees/minute at 2pm, 13 bees/minute at 10am for cranberry, and 1 bee/minute at 6 am for pumpkins. Objective 2 was a minor focus in the first year of the study. We collected data in each cropping system related to pollination and yield outcomes (e.g., fruit set, yield) that we can then relate to the visitation rates seen in our WiBee surveys. This objective will be a main focus for the second year of the project. Objective 3 relates to developing a grower-specific version of the WiBee tool. Throughout the first year of the project, we received feedback from our own crew and crop professional collaborators on ways to improve the user experience with the WiBee app. We have worked with our developer to implement these updates and will continue to make updates as the project progresses. Over the course of the first year of our project, we began to build the baseline data set that we need in order to develop grower-relevant thresholds of pollination levels for our cropping systems. Since we want the WiBee tool to be a useful and accessible tool for growers and crop professionals, we worked closely with our collaborators to modify our app and create protocols that are functional and usable by growers and crop professionals. We have one year of data that will be used to develop the crop-specific sampling protocols that will eventually contribute to the pollination recommendations for fruit crops.
Publications
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