Gardens reduce seasonal hunger gaps for farmland pollinators

Gardens can benefit pollinators living in surrounding farmland landscapes, but the reason for their value is not clear. Gardens are no different from many semi-natural farmland habitats in terms of the quantity of floral resources (pollen and nectar) they produce, but the timing of their resource supply is very different, which may explain their value. We show that gardens provide 15% of overall annual nectar in farmland landscapes in Southwest UK, but between 50% and 95% during early-spring and late-summer when farmland supplies are low. Gardens can therefore reduce seasonal nectar gaps experienced by farmland bumblebees. Consistent with this pattern, bumblebee activity increased in gardens relative to farmland during early spring and late summer. An agent-based model reinforces this point, showing that timing, not quantity, of garden nectar supply enhances bumblebee colony growth and survival in farmland. We show that over 90% of farmland in Great Britain is within one kilometre of a ..., There are four datasets in this Dryad submission which are listed below along with information on how they were collected and processed:
1) Garden_nectar_production
How it was collected:
Garden floral abundance was recorded during 2019 in 59 urban gardens in the city of Bristol, South West UK. Although gardens were sampled in a different year to farmland, the mean annual temperature, rainfall and growing season of these two years were similar and previous data from this region show a similar pattern of nectar phenology between years (Timberlake et al. 2019). Residential gardens included the land adjacent to and associated with each domestic property (both front and back gardens), irrespective of whether it was paved, vegetated, or used as a driveway. In total, gardens ranged in size from 31.3 m2 to 407.7 m2 (mean 156.4 m2 ±12.7 SE) and their selection was stratified by both geographical location and neighbourhood income (see Tew et al. 2022 for further details). From March to October 20..., , # Gardens reduce seasonal hunger gaps for farmland pollinators

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v41ns1s5j](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v41ns1s5j)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data included in this Dryad submission were used to answer the following questions: 1) Do gardens fill seasonal gaps in the resource supply of farmland landscapes?; 2) Do pollinators increase their use of gardens during gaps in farmland resource availability?; and 3) Do bumblebees respond more strongly to changes in the timing than the total quantity of garden resources?

Using bumblebees as a model group, and Southwest UK as a study region, we test these three hypotheses with a combination of empirical field data and agent-based-modelling.

**Question 1: Do gardens fill seasonal gaps in the resource supply of farmland landscapes?**

To determine whether floral resources provided by gardens have the potential to fill seasonal gaps in the food supply of farmland pollinators, we quantified t...