GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

Successful proposals should:

• Investigate essential functional roles of pollinators in natural and human-modified ecosystems, and associated ecosystem services. This should encompass ecosystem services underpinned by pollinators both directly and indirectly;
• Fill knowledge gaps on animal pollination ecology (what pollinates what, how much, where and when) and investigate the full spectrum of animals that pollinate wild and cultivated plants in Europe, going beyond the well-known insects (bees, hoverflies, butterflies, moths). The structure and functionality of plant-pollinator networks should be analysed. The research scope should include the European continent as well as EU overseas territories;
• Build a platform that will serve one-stop shop for information on animal pollination ecology. A database with systematised information on plan-pollinator interactions, including the spatial dimension of plant-pollinator networks, should be part of the platform. The platform should build on what already exists and should be devised in close collaboration with researchers and other potential users. Options to integrate this deliverable into the already existing platforms should be explored, with a view to ensure its long-term viability;
• Assess the dependency of society and the economy on ecosystem services underpinned directly and indirectly by pollinators, quantify and map the risks associated with pollinator decline. Monetary and non-monetary valuation of those ecosystem services should be advanced, including their tangible and less tangible elements, and utilised to improve ecosystem accounts and scale up their use in the public and private sector;
• Investigate biomass supply chains dependent on pollinators, build tools for businesses to assess their vulnerability to pollinator decline and improve guidelines on how they can help to reverse the decline and thereby mitigate future risks. This should in particular cover the food (including production of plants with mandatory cross-pollination), medicine, energy and materials sectors;
• Build tools for land managers and planners to support spatial decision-making with regard to the conservation of pollinators and protection of the local flow of ecosystem services that they deliver, e.g., digital atlases, maps, applications. In particular, tools for farmers should be developed, enabling assessment of impacts on their income and overall business performance of farms, early warning of pollination-deficit as well as social impacts on farming communities;
• Investigate the dependency of sustainable nutrition on pollinators and potential risks due to their decline. Particular attention should be paid to food with invaluable and irreplaceable properties for human health (e.g. with regard to micronutrients);
• Investigate risks of cascading effects in natural (natural plant-pollinators networks) and human-modified ecosystems due to pollinator decline and their impacts on human wellbeing, and undertake scenario forecasting towards 2050 in the case of an unmitigated pollinator decline. Uncertainty and irreversibility of the effects should be well integrated in the build-up of models.