“The bees are stirring – birds are on the wing –
… And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.”Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1825, “Work Without Hope”
On the 200th anniversary of the poem that gave us “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for sex, native bees are in decline globally. This decline means that hundreds of thousands of wild plants and about 85% of cultivated crops suffer inadequate pollination unless they are serviced by European honeybees from commercial hives. This practice costs U.S. farmers some $416 million annually for pollination services that were previously provided free by native bees.
Strategic interventions to reverse the downward trend of native pollinators must be guided by detailed information about where we should focus our efforts. Cornell scientists recently discovered that a good predictor of the number of bee species is abundance of different bird species. Their study found that while USDA land use satellite data is marginally successful at helping predict bees, the accuracy of predictions doubled when abundance data on 70+ bird species were added to the model. Birds and bees really do go together, and far more scientists and citizens observe birds than bees.
The Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Cornell Lab of Ornithology, with motivation from Walmart Inc. and funding from the Walmart Foundation, have produced the Wild Bee Diversity Prediction Tool for the Central and Eastern U.S. It consists of interactive maps of the number of wild bee species and changes in landscape conditions that can affect them. Underpinning this tool are some of the 2 billion observations of birds that are rigorously curated and made available by the Cornell Lab’s eBird platform.
The tool suggests where management interventions are likely to achieve the greatest bang for the buck, including parts of the U.S. Southeast, upper Northeast, and upper Midwest. Guided by this, the Cornell researchers are exploring collaborations with the Foods Cubed initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and The Nature Conservancy’s Foodscapes program, with a goal of identifying the counties in the upper Midwest corn belt where interventions might cost effectively mitigate bee declines while benefiting farmers. Interventions might include modifications of pesticide use on farm fields and changed management of habitat surrounding farm fields like that incentivized by USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program.
Ultimately, success will be measured as increases in native pollinator abundance coupled with lower commercial pollinator costs to farmers. While such results are still a few years away, I’m convinced that the collaborative approach exemplified by this project is the only way to win scalable, financially sustainable successes. It is, therefore, worth exploring a bit more how this partnership came about, both to encourage others and solicit collaboration from private sector organizations who share Cornell Atkinson’s passion for moving research into impact.
The path to collaboration among Cornell Atkinson, the Cornell Lab, Walmart Inc., the Walmart Foundation, and potentially the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and TNC has been long. It started with a 2019 request from Walmart Inc. to Patrick Beary, Cornell Atkinson’s Bruce H. Bailey Senior Director for Strategic Partnerships, to create a state-of-the-art county-level calculator for the U.S. of how soil carbon storage is affected by different farm field practices. Cornell Atkinson convened Walmart, TNC, Environmental Defense Fund, and Cornell experts, and self-funded a yearlong effort. Beary and his expert staff built the relationships among the parties, and Cornell Atkinson’s operations team provided the logistical support to allow the scientists and other participants to focus on the shared goal. The calculator was made public ahead of schedule and integrated into Walmart’s Project Gigaton in 2020, contributing to Walmart’s ahead-of-schedule success in 2024 of achieving the goal of their Project Gigaton, which was to remove a gigaton of carbon emissions from its supply chain.
On the heels of this success, the Walmart Foundation funded Cornell Atkinson to create a tool that a diverse set of actors (corporations, NGOs, and governments) could use to target their investments and efforts to increase native pollinators. That cross-sectoral collaboration produced the Wild Bee Diversity Prediction Tool, applications of which are now the focus of a growing circle of collaborative efforts to achieve on-the-ground success.
Our experience working with NGOs to help Walmart accomplish its climate and pollinator goals confirms the wisdom of the African proverb “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Doing solitary basic research and publishing it can be fast but has little to no short-term impact on urgent societal needs. On the other hand, it’s taken one million human observers several years to provide the data to eBird that we used for the pollinator work. It took a few years to build functional cross-sector relationships. Co-creating and co-executing research agendas with partners is difficult. It can be slow initially but guarantees that there are action-oriented partners who understand the results, are eager to use them, and look for future opportunities to repeat the cycle.
Let us know if your organization could put some of Cornell Atkinson’s tools to work or partner with us to produce research that would be useful to your sustainability goals.
Learn more about David M. Lodge