EBD Seminars | Maxime Eeraerts

Описание: Honeybees and wild bees for blueberry pollination: lessons learned and next steps

🔵 About the talk

This talk synthesizes research on insect-mediated pollination in highbush blueberry to understand when pollination limits yield, and how honeybees and wild bees contribute across regions, cultivars, and landscapes. It combines meta-analysis and new empirical research to link pollinator visitation, seed set, fruit quality, and landscape context. The work spans pollination ecology, agroecology, landscape ecology, and crop science, with clear implications for pollinator and farm management.

Profile summary
I did my PhD at Ghent University, in which I studied how landscape structure and pollinators mediate crop pollination in cherry cultivation in Belgium. After my PhD, I started a postdoc for nine months at Washington State University to study how to optimize honeybee management for enhancing blueberry yield in the USA. I then joined Michigan State University as a postdoc for one year, synthesizing evidence on pollinator contributions to blueberry pollination. Near the end of 2022 I returned to Ghent University to focused on pollinator conservation in agricultural landscapes and how farm management drives pollination and crop quality across different fruit crops. Currently, I am a postdoc at the lab of Dr. Ignasi Bartomeus at the EBD. Here, I will focus on how major global crops vary in their dependencies on multiple ecosystem services and sensitivities to environmental stressors, and how different pollinator types contribute to crop quality and yield across various major European crops.

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