Pollination and the integration of ecosystem services in landscape planning and rural development

Mapping and assessment of Ecosystem Services (ES) is a promising field of inquiry that aims to bridge the gap between nature conservation and policy making in different sectors and contexts. Within the class of Regulating and maintenance ES, pollination has recently been the target of great interest on the side of ecologists, planners, farmers and the media alike. In this paper, we adapted a wild pollination model by: scaling it down to fit the study context (the Italian region of Puglia); testing different approaches to refine the forest, road side, semi-natural vegetation and olive farming intensity components and; discussing the spatially explicit outcomes (Pollination potential, service and deficit maps) with regard to rural development programming and landscape planning. Findings point to a mismatch between demand and supply of the pollination ES, and help shed light on some spatial configurations that either mitigate or sharpen it. The prospects of mapping and assessment of pollination as a planning-support tool seem to depend critically on input data availability and accuracy, on fine-tuning models – as well as on establishing stronger links between the ecological functions that underpin pollination, the policy measures that might enhance them (be that binding regulations, agri-environmental schemes or spatial strategies) and the socio-economic practices (e.g., farming) that interact with both.