RCN PHASE 2; PROJECT 2 POLLINATORS; JOB 1 POLLINATOR MONITORING PROTOCOLS

Recent declines in commercial honey bee colonies, and potential impacts on crop production, have heightened attention on the plight of native pollinators.  Although many groups of native pollinators remain understudied and poorly understood, there is increasing evidence of alarming declines in some species.  For example, the once widespread rusty-patched bumblebee was recently listed as Federally Endangered, and significant declines of other North American bumblebees have been documented (Cameron et al. 2011). 

OBJECTIVE:  The objective of the Xeric Grassland, Barren, and Woodland Pollinator Conservation Project is to improve the ability of Northeast states to implement cost-effective habitat management for the benefit of native pollinators and RSGCN that depend upon these priority habitat types.

While there are many available vegetation monitoring protocols to build from, direct monitoring of pollinators is far more challenging.  Many pollinator taxa such as beetles and flies are poorly understood, and monitoring is extremely labor intensive.  Nonetheless, it is important to improve our ability to monitor declining pollinator taxa and begin to understand responses to habitat management.  Pollinator monitoring for this project will be limited to day-flying Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and bees.  Given cost constraints and challenges related to collecting baseline data for taxa that exhibit significant inter-annual variation, pollinator sampling may need to be limited to a subset of pilot sites and long-term monitoring frequency will be lower than for vegetation monitoring.