Removing non-crop flowers within orchards promotes the decline of pollinators, not their conservation: A comment on McDougall et al. (2021)

NABAES JODAR, DIEGO N.; PÉREZ-MÉNDEZ, NÉSTOR; BOTÍAS, CRISTINA; GARIBALDI, LUCAS A.; HÜNICKEN, PABLO L.; VELADO-ALONSO, ELENA; ZARAGOZA-TRELLO, CARLOS

INSECT CONSERVATION AND DIVERSITY

WILEY-LISS, DIV JOHN WILEY & SONS INC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2023 vol. 16 p. 550 - 554

1752-458X

1. Abundant and diverse floral resources are needed for the preservation of pollinatorpopulations and the services they provide to human societies. However, pollinators arenegatively affected by several agricultural practices, among which pesticide use and‘weed’ removal stand out.2. McDougall et al. (2021) published a paper titled “Managing orchard groundcover toreduce pollinator foraging post-bloom”, where they propose removing the within-fieldflowering ground vegetation after the mass flowering period of the crop ends, to reducepesticide exposure.3. They consider this is a bee conservation strategy, after observing it reduces theabundance and diversity of pollinators within the crop. However, despite assuming thisimplied a realization of an expected reduction in pesticide exposure, this was notquantified.4. Here, we give three main arguments against the proposal of the authors, i.e. the needfor providing accessible, sufficient, safe and seasonally-spread feeding resources to croppollinators, the potential role of diverse floral resources in their pesticide tolerance, andthe urgent need to reduce pesticide use and impact in agriculture.