SEPPI

Context

Interactions between plants and pollinators shape how both respond to environmental drivers and are critical to our food security and the maintenance of ecosystem services offered by wild plants. Both EuropaBON and eLTER have emphasised the necessity of simultaneously monitoring plants, pollinators, and their interactions, with the added requirement that this monitoring should be as inexpensive and as automated as possible.

Main objectives

SEPPI aims to develop and optimise the protocol (measurement, data flow, quality control, metadata), create pipelines for image processing, analysis, and visualisations, and investigate the scalability and sustainability of automated monitoring. We will use new, non-lethal technology to capture images of pollinators on flowers in the field using time-lapse cameras and deep learning to identify pollinators.

Local stakeholders, such as eLTER research site managers, will only adopt new protocols if they provide an added benefit, are not too labour-intensive, and are affordable. SEPPI aims to demonstrate the scalability and sustainability of automated methods. We envision a future in which plants, pollinators and their interactions are monitored every year with minimal costs and high automation.

Main activities

Scientific outputs include quantification of the abundance and diversity of four orders of pollinating insects across space and time and European maps of pollinator trends, as well as quantification of changes in plant-pollinator interactions, and the degree to which environmental change alters pollinators through changes in plant communities. Protocols and pipelines will be co-created with the pre-identified stakeholders that will use them: scientists, research site managers, eLTER, EuropaBON and EEA.

The developed protocol will be tested in the field sites of the PIs for performance at detecting plant-pollinator interaction change across a variety of ecological gradients, such as land-use, restoration, altitude, fragmentation, and ecological succession. As pollination ecologists are only recently investigating network responses to each of these gradients, each case study represents a novel contribution to science.

Together, these case studies will allow us to test hypotheses about how well automated methods detect changes in interactions across a wide range of biogeographical settings and types of gradients. SEPPI will quantify the implementation costs for equipment and, labour and in each revision of the protocol will seek ways to reduce these costs.