Agricultural specialisation increases the vulnerability of pollination services for smallholder farmers

Smallholder farms make up 84% of all farms worldwide and feed two billion people. These farms are heavily reliant on ecosystem services and vulnerable to environmental change, yet under-represented in the ecological literature. The high diversity of crops in these systems makes it challenging to identify and manage the best providers of an ecosystem service, such as the best pollinators to meet the needs of multiple crops. It is also unclear whether ecosystem service requirements change as smallholders transition towards more specialised commercial farming – an increasing trend worldwide. Here, we present a new metric for predicting the species providing ecosystem services in diverse multi-crop farming systems. Working in 10 smallholder villages in rural Nepal, we use this metric to test whether key pollinators, and the management actions that support them, differ based on a farmers’ agricultural priority (producing nutritious food to feed the family versus generating income from cash c..., , , # Agricultural specialisation increases the vulnerability of pollination services for smallholder farmers

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbs91](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbs91)

This submission includes two datasets: 1) a database of 10,975 plant-pollinator interactions; 2) data on the pollen loads of a range of different insect taxa recorded in the plant-pollinator surveys.

Data were collected in 10 smallholder farming villages (2400-3000 metres ASL; temperate climate) in Patarasi Rural Municipality of Jumla District, Nepal. Each study village comprised a cluster of 100-400 closely spaced households interspersed with small vegetable gardens and livestock enclosures. Village surroundings include many small (0.01–0.3 ha) arable fields and apple orchards as well as large areas of steep, heavily-grazed grassland pasture and native coniferous forest (see paper for more details).

Plant-pollinator interaction data were collected by conducting plant-pollinator visitation surveys...