Caring for Pollinators - Bundesamt für Naturschutz

Ruggiero, Adams, Saraiva North and Inter American Pollinator Initiatives
3.1 North and Inter-American Pollinator Initiatives
by Michael Ruggiero, USA; Laurie Adams, USA; Antonio Saraiva, Brazil
Two important regional pollinator initiatives have developed as a result of the concern for
declining pollinator populations in the Americas: the North American Pollinator Protection
Campaign (NAPPC) and the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network’s (IABIN)
Pollinators Thematic Network (PTN). The former is a partnership of more than 120
organizations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, while the latter is a pollinatorspecific
information network relevant to the countries of the western hemisphere. This
presentation highlights several activities that can be classified among the major elements of
the International Pollinators Initiative (IPI) implementation plan as elaborated by the UN
Convention on Biological Diversity. These elements include assessment, adaptive
management, capacity building, and mainstreaming.
Assessment stresses the need to determine the status and trends of pollinator populations,
prepare checklists and catalogs of pollinators, and associate pollinators with their sources of
pollen. NAPPC partners have supported a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
on the status of pollinators in North America. The 2007 report found direct evidence for the
decline of some pollinator species. NAPPC partners (the Integrated Taxonomic Information
System (ITIS) and the Smithsonian Institution) have contributed to the development of a
world checklist of bees (available at www.itis.gov, www.discoverlife.org, and the Species
2000 and ITIS Catalogue of Life Annual Checklist) and to digitizing and providing an on-line
version of the seminal work, Catalog of Hymenoptera in America North of Mexico (Krombein
et al., 1979 at http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=krombein). The IABIN PTN has
collaborated with the FAO Global Pollination Project to develop a schema and tool for
entering data on pollinators and their associated plants and making it available on the web.
Adaptive management includes conservation measures such as preventing the importation
of exotic pollinators, restoring native vegetation to support pollinators, and supporting
targeted research on the causes of pollinator population declines. NAPPC partners have
responded by publishing a “white paper” on the Importation of Non-native Bumble Bees into
North America: Potential Consequences of Using Bombus terrestris and Other Non-Native
Bumble Bees for Greenhouse Crop Pollination in Canada, Mexico, and the United States
(Winter et. al., 2006) and a series of regional planting guides for farmers, resource
managers, and gardeners. In addition, NAPPC has worked with private industry (Burt’s
Bees and Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream) to fund research on Colony Collapse Disorder in
honeybees.
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