Support to the Implementation of Conservation Plans for Threatened Pollinator Species

What will Buglife do?

Buglife’s role in this consortium is to ‘promote and facilitate the implementation of the Species Action Plans’ or in other words, to find the most efficient way of progressing the outlined actions across the three plans with limited associated budget. This is being done by analysing the plans to identify the most pivotal actions to help focus resources, carrying out stakeholder mapping, identifying barriers and challenges, and researching and promoting funding opportunities and new partnerships. Alongside this, three new steering groups, one per plan, have been set up to bring together key stakeholders across the EU, to support the plans’ progress towards target species conservation. Best practice guidelines for teasel-plant bees, veteran tree hoverflies and Canarian Islands endemic pollinator conservation and habitat management will be created and published, with species champions selected.

Across the three plans, the project hopes to take steps towards:

• Self-sustaining and healthy populations of the threatened target species.
• Networks of grassland rich in teasel plants for solitary bees, veteran trees and decaying wood adjacent to flower-rich habitats for hoverflies, and large and connected areas of native laurel forest habitat for the Canarian Islands endemics.
• Governance and protection established and secured for the target species.
• Better understanding of the distribution and biology of target species.
• Authorities, landowners, conservationists and local communities with increased awareness on importance of target species, the value of their habitats, the threats to their populations, and engagement in the necessary conservation actions.
• A reduction in key threats and improvement of habitat availability for target species in priority countries.

Once the project is completed, this will also act as a blueprint for help with the implementation of any future conservation action plans.

How can you get involved?

If you are a Masters student and would like to work on a thesis underpinned by one of the actions plans, you can get in touch with Lucia for more details at [email protected]. Example topics:

• Exploring existing policies and legal instruments for the protection of veteran trees across Europe.
• Research on habitat preferences of the six-target teasel-plant bee species.
• Creating outreach materials for conservation of the four target species of pollinators on the Canarian Islands.