Progress Towards Integrating Forests Into North American Pollinator Conservation: New Insights, Past Findings, and Future Directions

Abstract

Managed forests comprise a significant portion of the North American land base and have potential to contribute to pollinator conservation, yet our understanding of how forest management influences insect pollinators is limited. In this paper, we highlight the twelve articles comprising this special issue on forest insect pollinators, summarize research evaluating management impacts on this group within North America, and outline productive avenues for future research. The new articles published here make great strides towards improving our understanding of the diversity, flower associations, and sensitivities of forest insect pollinators, including their responses to management practices. Nevertheless, this group remains unstudied in much North America, including Mexico, Canada, and many US states. Additionally, past studies have largely been descriptive, of short duration, focused on a limited set of topics, and distributed unevenly across forest types. Existing knowledge gaps call for studies aimed at (1) determining which pollinator taxa are forest-dependent, (2) developing management guidelines specific to conifer and broadleaf forests, (3) assessing the value of older forests to insect pollinators, (4) investigating the responses of individual species, and (5) quantifying the effects of less-studied management practices. We encourage new investigations on these topics, especially those that leverage silvicultural practices as a priori manipulative experiments to provide strong inference regarding how management activities influence insect pollinators. Such research will add to our growing knowledge base and help shape future management aimed at maximizing forest ecosystem health, including the conservation of pollinators reliant on these areas.