Sustainability Commons^™

Garden Pollinators And The Potential For Ecosystem Service Flow To Urban And Peri-Urban Agriculture, Gail A. Langellotto, Andony Melathopoulos, Isabella Messer, Aaron Anderson, Nathan Mcclintock, Lucas Costner

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Hedgerows, flowering strips, and natural areas that are adjacent to agricultural land have been shown to benefit crop production, via the provision of insect pollinators that pollinate crops. However, we do not yet know the extent to which bee habitat in the form of urban gardens might contribute to pollination services in surrounding crops. We explored whether gardens might provision pollinators to adjacent agricultural areas by sampling bees from gardens in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area, and estimating typical foraging distances in the context of commercialand residential-scale pollination-dependent crops up to 1000 m from garden study sites. We estimate that …