How does agriculture support the pollinators that many food crops are dependent on?
It's a globally important question, and one that University of New England (UNE) scientist Dr Romina Rader will spend the next four years working on with the support of a newly announced $900,000 Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship grant.
"Historically we have focused on how pollinators can support crop production, because about 200 food crops benefit from insects" said Dr Rader.
"But over the last few years, we have come to realise that pollinator health is equally important."
"There is a realisation that we don't adequately understand crop-pollinator-habitat interactions. We need new methods to understand interactions among different types of resources and what happens when we remove or add pollinator habitat to farms."
Dr Rader hopes her ARC-supported work will help support both agricultural productivity and pollinators of all kinds. "We need outcomes that provide wins all round."
Dr Rader's work on pollinators has already been recognised by the ARC. In 2016, she received a $372,000 Early Career Researcher Award to investigate the role of pollinators world-wide in determining fruit quantity and quality, with the aim of building knowledge to support Australian production.
That work introduced her to a global trove of scientific literature on pollinators. One of the objectives of Dr Rader's Future Fellowship grant will be to synthesise that work to identify which global food crops are most dependent on insects, with the aim of developing a ranking by importance of pollinator-dependent food crops and the insects that support them.
Based on that assessment, Dr Rader will then aim to identify the natural resources that the most important pollinators depend on. Her investigation will look at the health of the "floral resources" available to key pollinators globally, and also other vital resources, like water and shelter.
She will bring on a post-doctoral and two doctoral students to help with the analysis, and enlist a network of international collaborators.
The short-term objective of Dr Rader's project will be a far better understanding of how humans can support perhaps their most important relationships with the insect world.
But beyond just knowledge, Dr Rader hopes that her work will eventually inform government policy in matters like strategic pollination plans for key crops.
She currently sits on the recently established International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (ICUN) Wild Bee Group, representing Oceania.
"We've tended to take the role of pollinators in our food production for granted," she said. "Now we realise that human activity is disrupting pollinators, as is happening with so many natural processes. If we don't start to understand what's happening, and what to do about it, it's possible that the productivity of pollinator-dependent crops will start to decline at a time when the human demand for food is growing exponentially.
UNE's Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Heiko Daniel, said the ARC's Future Fellowship grant was well invested in one of Australia's foremost experts on pollination.
"Already in her short career, Dr Rader has proven to be one of the country's most forward-thinking pollination researchers, and is highly respected by industry," Professor Daniel said.
"This prestigious ARC fellowship funding will allow her to concentrate fully on finding answers to one of the urgent questions we have to resolve if we are to sustain our global population in the 21st Century."
"Australia, and the world, stands to benefit."
