Special Profile: Pollination and pollinators.
Abstract
This Special Profile contains papers covering several topics, including the impact of habitat fragmentation and semi-natural landscape elements for population densities, species richness and community composition of bees. Three papers focus on the combined effects of local and landscape-scale land use intensity and semi-natural or natural landscape elements on pollinators. The last two papers focus on pollination functions and consider cross-pollination rates in a major crop and plant-pollinator networks in heathlands. The papers mainly deal with bees (Hymenoptera: Apiformes) as the most important pollinator taxa in temperate ecosystems, but butterflies and syrphid flies are also considered in three papers.