Interreg North Sea Region - BEESPOKE

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The project “Benefitting Ecosystems through Evaluation of food Supplies for Pollination to Open up Knowledge for End users (BEESPOKE)” is coordinated by Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (Loddington, UK) and has 12 other partners in the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The project lasts 43 months.

Project descripton

Insect pollination is worth €15 Billion in the EU but wild pollinators are declining because of loss
in flower-rich habitats. In response the EU adopted a pollinator initiative in 2018. The NSR is one
of the most productive agricultural areas but pollinators are in decline across the region. The
overall objective is to increase levels of pollinators and crop pollination at local and landscape
scales by providing land managers and policy makers with new expertise, tools and financial
knowledge to create more sustainable and resilient agroecosystems. BEESPOKE brings
together a wide range of partners from policy makers, research institutes, advisory and end
users from 6 NSR countries to develop new products and approaches to increase the diversity of
insect pollinators and crop yields by 10%. We will develop bespoke seed mixes and habitat
management guidelines to support the suite of pollinators required for 14 crop types across 72
demonstration sites. Sites for each crop will showcase best management practices and training
materials will be developed for biodiversity monitoring and measuring pollination. The same
agroecosystems occur across the NSR and transnational cooperation will also give economies
of scale for development of these novel tools. The approach will empower land managers to
adopt pollinator management as a routine practice, fostering a bottom-up, land manager
approach, creating a legacy to ensure continuing improvements for insect pollination of food
crops.

Objectives

These are the objectives of BEESPOKE:

  • Enhance and improve non-crop habitats for pollinators
  • Create more resilient ecosystems for pollinators and crops
  • Demonstration of improved habitats for pollinators and techniques for measuring pollination
  • Stakeholder engagement, delivery and uptake of outputs and results to bring change in land management and policy

Role of Ghent University

The BEESPOKE project is a unique opportunity to validate models calculating pollination services. By the use of spatially-explicit models and land use/land cover maps UGent predicts pollination services in orchards.

UGent teams up with the Flemish Land agency (VLM), to provide them a science-based advice tool. For the region of Flanders the goal is to predict the influence of landscape changes on the pollination services on the (small) local scale. 

On the broader scale pollination estimates will be made based on the data delivered by the project partners.


Website

BEESPOKE    


Contact

Prof. Guy Smagghe
Department Plants and Crops
Phone number: +32 (0)9 264 61 50
E-mail: