Pollinators
Home gardens have a tremendous amount of potential for fostering pollinator habitats and ensuring the health, safety and existence of future populations of pollinator species.
Understanding Pollinators
Support pollinators through thoughtful design
Pollinators are essential to ecosystem health and our food supply, yet their populations are declining due to habitat loss and environmental stressors. By creating pollinator-friendly gardens with native plants and sustainable practices, you can help restore habitats, support biodiversity, and bring more life to your landscape.
About 90% of wild flowering plants and nearly 100 different food crops in the U.S. rely on biotic pollination, which also supports birds, mammals, and healthy plant communities.
Creating a pollinator garden offers essential nutrients for pollinators while enhancing the landscape with vibrant wildlife. Native plants also provide ecosystem services like carbon sequestration and erosion control.
Pollinator populations have dropped in recent decades due to habitat loss, pesticides, and extreme weather, underscoring the need for pollinator-friendly landscapes.
Why are pollinators important?
It is estimated that about 90 percent of wild flowering plants depend on biotic pollination, such as that provided by bees, butterflies, wasps, moths, birds, bats and many other animals. Beyond that, approximately 100 different food crops produced in the United States depend primarily on biotic pollination; similarly, 25 percent of birds and some mammals also depend on the fruit and seed provided by flowering plants. Animal pollinators carry pollen on their bodies while traveling from one plant to another, a more efficient way for the plant to get fertilized.
The role of pollinators in a sustainable garden
Planting and growing a pollinator garden provides resources for the pollinators that visit and brings attractive wildlife for the gardener’s enjoyment. Natural habitat areas necessary to support pollinators have decreased significantly due to land development, prevalence of lawns, and monoculture farm crops. Pollinators rely on plants to provide them nutrients for their survival, while plants rely on pollinators to deliver pollen and ensure their long-term survival. Pollinators also help maintain native plant communities, which provide a variety of other ecosystem services, such as:
- Carbon sequestration
- Water filtration
- Erosion control
- Soil health
- Urban heat island reduction
How pollinators support our landscapes and lives
According the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, residential areas in the United States are estimated to make up a total of 103 million acres of land. While these landscapes provide an array of services for humans, pollinator species also use these landscapes for food, water, and shelter; in doing so, they help maintain many functions necessary for the health of human habitats and our ecosystems at large.
Yet, there has been a significant population decline of pollinator species in the past three decades. The primary stressors of this situation include the loss of breeding habitat due to agriculture and other land conversions, including both rural and urban developments, logging and deforestation at overwintering sites (particularly for monarch butterflies), pesticide and fertilizer use, and extreme weather conditions.
Unsustainable vs. sustainable gardens
| Unsustainable landscape | Sustainable landscape |
|---|---|
| Plant diversity is minimal, and nonnative and ornamental invasive plant species are used in the garden. | Diverse flowering native plant species and communities make up the garden. |
| All soil is heavily covered with mulch or planted. | Among planted areas, bare soil is unaltered and left as nesting habitats or mud sources for pollinator species. |
| Pools or dishes of drinking water are not provided. | Many intentional water sources are provided, such as birdbaths, ephemeral pools, shallow dishes and puddling places, and water is replenished regularly. |
| Thickets or hedges are frequently maintained as uniform shapes, requiring maintenance during pollinator activities, such as shelter or nesting. | Native plants grown in thickets or hedges act as windbreaks and/or nesting habitats and provide protection from predators; they are not cut back during pollinator activity. |
| Lawns are large expanses of single grass species that are highly maintained, irrigated and fertilized. | Lawns are reduced in size and diverse in plant species, including some flowering ground cover or forbs that are beneficial to pollinator species. |
| Entire lawn area is fertilized and chemically treated to remove weeds and other unwanted pests, which can be toxic to pollinators. | Unwanted weeds and pests are removed by hand or other non-chemical procedures. Chemical spot treatment may occur but is infrequent and rare. |
| New plants introduced to the garden have been grown in the nursery using neonicotinoids or other harmful pesticides, which are absorbed into plant tissue and can be present in pollen and nectar, making them toxic to pollinators. | New plants are purchased from nurseries that use less detrimental practices to treat plants during production. |
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