The contributions of flower strips to wild bee conservation in agricultural landscapes can be predicted using pollinator habitat suitability models

Sowing flower strips along field edges is a widely adopted method for conserving pollinating insects in agricultural landscapes. To maximize the effect of flower strips given limited resources, we need spatially explicit tools that can prioritize their placement, and for identifying plant species to include in seed mixtures.
We sampled bees and plant species as well as their interactions in a semi-controlled field experiment with roadside/field edge pairs with/without a sown flower strip at 31 sites in Norway and used a regional spatial model of solitary bee species richness to test if the effect of flower strips on bee species richness was predictable from the modelled solitary bee species richness.
We found that sites with flower strips were more bee species rich compared to sites without flower strips and that this effect was greatest in areas that the regional solitary bee species richness model had identified to be particularly important for bees. Spatial models revealed that even ..., We used a paired design of study sites located in Southeastern Norway consisting of a field edge and an adjacent vegetated roadside, with or without a sown flower strip in the field. During early spring (April) 2022, we used data from Vestfold/Telemark County Governor’s office to identify sites where farmers had previously (in 2021 and sometimes also in 2020) sown a flower strip along the field edge. We included sites in our study if farmers were also planning to sow a flower strip along the same field edge in 2022. Species composition of the flower strips varied, but Phacelia tanacetifolia, Trifolium pratense and Trifolium repens were commonly used in the seed mixtures. We paired each flower strip site with a control site (i.e. study site without flower strip) with a road side of similar width, located between one and five kilometers from the flower strip site. We considered our samples as independent, i.e. that they sampled different bee communities, because distances of one km or gre..., Data and associated R script can be opened and run using R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/. , # Title of Dataset: The contributions of flower strips to wild bee conservation in agricultural landscapes can be predicted using pollinator habitat suitability models

The data contain data collected from surveys, spatial data showing the location of study sites, and raster maps and R code. The R code allows running the analyses in the manuscript and testing for the effects of flower strips on bee species richness and for using an existing spatial model of solitary bee species richness to predict the spatial effects of sowing flower strips.
The data include R code and raw data (.csv, .shp, .tif) files required to reproduce the analyses in the manuscript and print figures 2-4.

## Description of the Data and file structure

R\_script\_for\_Sydenham\_et\_al\_2023\_Ecological\_Solutions\_and\_Evidence.R

> R script for running analyses and producing figures.

Site transect lines.shp (with: .shx,.prj,.dbf):

> Shapefile with study sites as 50m spatial lines along road sides and field...