Pollination by animals is an important service for wild plant communities as well as for agricultural crops. The service is mainly provided by insects, especially honeybees and a wide range of wild bees but also butterflies. A large number of crops depends globally on this pollination service – examples are apples, oranges, cocoa, coffee, strawberries and many more. While the demand for pollination services has been increasing in the last decades pollinators have been exposed to increasing threads by land use change, pesticide use, invasive species and climate change related effects. Maps of the demand for the service and on the dependency of agricultural production on the service (Lautenbach, 2019) show that wide areas across most countries would be affected by a major hit to wild and dominated pollinators. These maps provide essential information for environmental management and land use planning since they indicate benefits provided by natural habitats and green linear elements such as hedgerows. Getting ecosystem services on the map does not solve the problem but is an important first step to think about consequences of human land use and how to create win-win situations between ecosystems and human well-being. This shows how GIScience contributes to sustainable development.
Lautenbach, Sven. „Provisioning Ecosystem Services at Risk: Pollination Benefits and Pollination Dependency of Cropping Systems at the Global Scale“. In Atlas of Ecosystem Services, herausgegeben von Matthias Schröter, Aletta Bonn, Stefan Klotz, Ralf Seppelt, und Cornelia Baessler, 97–104. Springer International Publishing, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96229-0_16.