Sam Hanes, Dept. of Anthropology, UMaine and Brianne Du Clos, PhD Student, Ecology & Environmental Sciences, UMaine
A major problem for agricultural sustainability is that many innovations involve uncertainty. For example, in crop pollination, farmers have two source: commerical honey bee rentals or wild bees. The latter are to hard to assess and so managing them more intensively, or incorporating them into decision-making more systematically, is challenging because of the higher uncertainty. Our team produced the Bee Mapper, the first wild bee habitat assessment tool, to help farmers meet this challenge. It as a part of a broader inter-disciplinary effort to help them assess the surrounding landscape’s effect on their whole suite of pests and beneficial insects.
