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Abstract Despite the importance of insect pollination to produce marketable fruits, insect pollination management is limited by insufficient knowledge about key crop pollinator species. This lack of knowledge is due in part to (1) the extensive labour involved in collecting direct observations of pollen transport, (2) the variability of insect assemblages over space and time and (3) the possibility that pollinators may need access to wild plants as well as crop floral resources.We address these problems using strawberry in the United Kingdom as a case study. First, we compare two proxies for estimating pollinator importance: flower visits and pollen transport. Pollen‐transport data might provide a closer approximation of pollination service, but visitation data are less time‐consuming to collect. Second, we identify insectparametersthat are associated with high importance as pollinators, estimated using each of the proxies above. Third, we estimated insects' use of wild plants as well as the strawberry crop.Overall, pollinator importances estimated based on easier‐to‐collect visitation data were strongly correlated with importances estimated based on pollen loads. Both frameworks suggest that bees (ApisandBombus) and hoverflies (Eristalis) are likely to be key pollinators of strawberries, although visitation data underestimate the importance of bees.Moving beyond species identities, abundant, relatively specialised insects with long active periods are likely to provide more pollination services.Most insects visiting strawberry plants also carried pollen from wild plants, suggesting that pollinators need diverse floral resources.Identifying essential pollinators or pollinator parameters based on visitation data will reach the same general conclusions as those using pollen transport data, at least in monoculture crop systems. Managers may be able to enhance pollination service by preserving habitats surrounding crop fields to complement pollinators' diets and provide habitats for diverse life stages of wild pollinators. 

Abstract Novel methods for sampling and characterizing biodiversity hold great promise for re-evaluating patterns of life across the planet. The sampling of airborne spores with a cyclone sampler, and the sequencing of their DNA, have been suggested as an efficient and well-calibrated tool for surveying fungal diversity across various environments. Here we present data originating from the Global Spore Sampling Project, comprising 2,768 samples collected during two years at 47 outdoor locations across the world. Each sample represents fungal DNA extracted from 24 m³of air. We applied a conservative bioinformatics pipeline that filtered out sequences that did not show strong evidence of representing a fungal species. The pipeline yielded 27,954 species-level operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Each OTU is accompanied by a probabilistic taxonomic classification, validated through comparison with expert evaluations. To examine the potential of the data for ecological analyses, we partitioned the variation in species distributions into spatial and seasonal components, showing a strong effect of the annual mean temperature on community composition. 

Abstract Fungi are among the most diverse and ecologically important kingdoms in life. However, the distributional ranges of fungi remain largely unknown as do the ecological mechanisms that shape their distributions^1,2. To provide an integrated view of the spatial and seasonal dynamics of fungi, we implemented a globally distributed standardized aerial sampling of fungal spores³. The vast majority of operational taxonomic units were detected within only one climatic zone, and the spatiotemporal patterns of species richness and community composition were mostly explained by annual mean air temperature. Tropical regions hosted the highest fungal diversity except for lichenized, ericoid mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal fungi, which reached their peak diversity in temperate regions. The sensitivity in climatic responses was associated with phylogenetic relatedness, suggesting that large-scale distributions of some fungal groups are partially constrained by their ancestral niche. There was a strong phylogenetic signal in seasonal sensitivity, suggesting that some groups of fungi have retained their ancestral trait of sporulating for only a short period. Overall, our results show that the hyperdiverse kingdom of fungi follows globally highly predictable spatial and temporal dynamics, with seasonality in both species richness and community composition increasing with latitude. Our study reports patterns resembling those described for other major groups of organisms, thus making a major contribution to the long-standing debate on whether organisms with a microbial lifestyle follow the global biodiversity paradigms known for macroorganisms^4,5. 

Abstract The arrangement of plant species within a landscape influences pollination via changes in pollinator movement trajectories and plant–pollinator encounter rates. Yet the combined effects of landscape composition and pollinator traits (especially specialisation) on pollination success remain hard to quantify empirically.We used an individual‐based model to explore how landscape and pollinator specialisation (degree) interact to influence pollination. We modelled variation in the landscape by generating gradients of plant species intermixing—from no mixing to complete intermixing. Furthermore, we varied the level of pollinator specialisation by simulating plant–pollinator (six to eight species) networks of different connectance. We then compared the impacts of these drivers on three proxies for pollination: visitation rate, number of consecutive visits to the focal plant species and expected number of plants pollinated.We found that the spatial arrangements of plants and pollinator degree interact to determine pollination success, and that the influence of these drivers on pollination depends on how pollination is estimated. For most pollinators, visitation rate increases in more plant mixed landscapes. Compared to the two more functional measures of pollination, visitation rate overestimates pollination service. This is particularly severe in landscapes with high plant intermixing and for generalist pollinators. Interestingly, visitation rate is less influenced by pollinator traits (pollinator degree and body size) than are the two functional metrics, likely because ‘visitation rate’ ignores the order in which pollinators visit plants. However, the visitation sequence order is crucial for the expected number of plants pollinated, since only prior visits to conspecific individuals can contribute to pollination. We show here that this order strongly depends on the spatial arrangements of plants, on pollinator traits and on the interaction between them.Taken together, our findings suggest that visitation rate, the most commonly used proxy for pollination in network studies, should be complemented with more functional metrics which reflect the frequency with which individual pollinators revisit the same plant species. Our findings also suggest that measures of landscape structure such as plant intermixing and density—in combination with pollinators' level of specialism—can improve estimates of the probability of pollination. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog. 

Abstract Smallholder farmers are some of the poorest and most food insecure people on Earth. Their high nutritional and economic reliance on home‐grown produce makes them particularly vulnerable to environmental stressors such as pollinator loss or climate change which threaten agricultural productivity. Improving smallholder agriculture in a way that is environmentally sustainable and resilient to climate change is a key challenge of the 21st century.Ecological intensification, whereby ecosystem services are managed to increase agricultural productivity, is a promising solution for smallholders. However, smallholder farms are complex socio‐ecological systems with a range of social, ecological and environmental factors interacting to influence ecosystem service provisioning. To truly understand the functioning of a smallholder farm and identify the most effective management options to support household food and nutrition security, a holistic, systems‐based understanding is required.In this paper, we propose a network approach to understand, visualise and model the complex interactions occurring among wild species, crops and people on smallholder farms. Specifically, we demonstrate how networks may be used to (a) identify wild species with a key role in supporting, delivering or increasing the resilience of an ecosystem service; (b) quantify the value of an ecosystem service in a way that is relevant to the food and nutrition security of smallholders; and (c) understand the social interactions that influence the management of shared ecosystem services.Using a case study based on data from rural Nepal, we demonstrate how this framework can be used to connect wild plants, pollinators and crops to key nutrients consumed by humans. This allows us to quantify the nutritional value of an ecosystem service and identify the wild plants and pollinators involved in its provision, as well as providing a framework to predict the effects of environmental change on human nutrition.Our framework identifies mechanistic links between ecosystem services and the nutrients consumed by smallholder farmers and highlights social factors that may influence the management of these services. Applying this framework to smallholder farms in a range of socio‐ecological contexts may provide new, sustainable and equitable solutions to smallholder food and nutrition security. A freePlain Language Summarycan be found within the Supporting Information of this article. 

Abstract Fungi are highly diverse organisms, which provide multiple ecosystem services. However, compared with charismatic animals and plants, the distribution patterns and conservation needs of fungi have been little explored. Here, we examined endemicity patterns, global change vulnerability and conservation priority areas for functional groups of soil fungi based on six global surveys using a high‐resolution, long‐read metabarcoding approach. We found that the endemicity of all fungi and most functional groups peaks in tropical habitats, including Amazonia, Yucatan, West‐Central Africa, Sri Lanka, and New Caledonia, with a negligible island effect compared with plants and animals. We also found that fungi are predominantly vulnerable to drought, heat and land‐cover change, particularly in dry tropical regions with high human population density. Fungal conservation areas of highest priority include herbaceous wetlands, tropical forests, and woodlands. We stress that more attention should be focused on the conservation of fungi, especially root symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal fungi in tropical regions as well as unicellular early‐diverging groups and macrofungi in general. Given the low overlap between the endemicity of fungi and macroorganisms, but high conservation needs in both groups, detailed analyses on distribution and conservation requirements are warranted for other microorganisms and soil organisms.