Mutually beneficial pollinator diversity and crop yield outcomes in small and large farms

• Autores: Lucas A Garibaldi, Luísa G. Carvalheiro, Bernard E. Vaissière, Barbara Gemmill-Herren
• Localización: Science, ISSN 0036-8075, Vol. 351, Nº 6271, 2016, págs. 388-391
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 4 Citas
• Resumen

  • Ecological intensification, or the improvement of crop yield through enhancement of biodiversity, may be a sustainable pathway toward greater food supplies. Such sustainable increases may be especially important for the 2 billion people reliant on small farms, many of which are undernourished, yet we know little about the efficacy of this approach. Using a coordinated protocol across regions and crops, we quantify to what degree enhancing pollinator density and richness can improve yields on 344 fields from 33 pollinator-dependent crop systems in small and large farms from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For fields less than 2 hectares, we found that yield gaps could be closed by a median of 24% through higher flower-visitor density. For larger fields, such benefits only occurred at high flower-visitor richness. Worldwide, our study demonstrates that ecological intensification can create synchronous biodiversity and yield outcomes.