The European Research Executive Agency (REA) organised a workshop on 10 October 2022 to examine the current status of pollinators. The discussions and results of the workshop are now available in a newly published EU report on the “Opportunities and knowledge gaps for EU Research and Innovation on pollinators”.

The workshop’s objective was to pinpoint significant knowledge areas that require additional attention and propose potential solutions based on EU-funded projects that support pollinators, such as PoshBee, B-GOOD, Safeguard, Ecostack, SPRING, Orbit, Sting, Pulse and SHOWCASE. 

Attendees were encouraged to discuss the current state of play, identify best practices and answer four main questions:

• How can we integrate and optimise wild and managed pollinators into a sustainable service for agricultural systems? What can we do and what do we need to know?
• What proportion of wild pollinators, particularly bees, can utilise/survive in European agricultural landscapes?
• New and developing tools for monitoring pollinator health and drivers of bee health? What do we have and what is missing?
• What is not known about pollination services in agricultural and semi-natural/natural ecosystems? How do we find out?

The discussions around these questions and their answers are now the object of the new EU report on pollinators, co-authored by SHOWCASE’s coordinator David Kleijn, as well as other project members such as Simon Potts.

Read the full report here.