Maine Project
Pollination Security for Fruit and Vegetable Crops in the Northeast (collaborative project with Frank Drummond, Aaron Hoshide, Sam Hanes, Alison Dibble at UMaine)
January 2012 - May 2019
Personnel
Participating Agencies
- USDA Standard Research and Extension Project
Pollinator-dependent crops require a readily available source of pollinators. Although honey bees provide this service for a variety of crops, a diverse pollinator community is needed to ensure sustainability in this service. Native bee pollinators potentially contribute to this sustainability, however, knowledge about factors that affect their abundance and distributions is lacking. We are collaborating with a larger team of scientists to examine a variety of factors that potentially affect native pollinators of blueberries. Our focus is to understand relationships between native pollinators of wild blueberries and the landscape composition and arrangement around wild blueberry fields.
| Research Publications | Publication Date |
|---|---|
| Groff, S.C., C.S. Loftin, F.A. Drummond, S. Bushmann, and B.McGill. 2016. Parameterization of the InVEST Crop Pollination Model to spatially predict abundance of wild blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium Aiton) native bee pollinators in Maine, USA. Environmental Modeling and Software 79:1-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.01.003 | Download | January 2016 |
| Du Clos, Brianne, F. Drummond, and C.S. Loftin. 2020. Landscape context across a single crop system affects wild bee communities. Environmental Entomology. 49: 502-515. https://doi.org/10.1093/ee/nvaa001 | January 2020 |
| Du Clos, B., F.A. Drummond, and C.S. Loftin. Effects of an early mass‑flowering crop on wild bee communities and traits in power line corridors vary with blooming plants and landscape context. Landscape Ecology; https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01495-9 | August 2022 |
| Theses and Dissertations | Publication Date |
|---|---|
| Chapin, Shannon J. 2014. the application of spatial modeling tools to predict native bee abundance in Maine's lowbush blueberries. M.S. thesis, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, 55pp. | May 2014 |