The role of landscape connectivity in maintaining pollinator biodiversity needs reconsideration

Despite ongoing conservation efforts, pollinator biodiversity continues to decline at unprecedented rates. Conservation approaches tend to ignore landscape connectivity and focus mainly on increasing the availability of resources. Studies often find low or no effect of landscape connectivity on pollinator biodiversity. This may lead to a conclusion that pollinator assemblages are not sensitive to changes in landscape connectivity because pollinators are mobile species that can tolerate habitat fragmentation. However, the role of landscape connectivity might be underestimated, because of a failure to capture the effect on pollinator assemblages, undermining conservation efforts. Here we discuss evidence and theory indicating that the effects of landscape connectivity are underestimated due to a lack of consideration of the multiple aspects of biodiversity, including its spatial organization, community composition, functional diversity, species evenness, extinction debt and genetic diversity; and failure to measure aspects of landscape connectivity relevant to pollinators, namely spatial scale, matrix permeability, inter-habitat type connectivity and potential role of linear elements. Currently, available empirical evidence is scarce, thus, we suggest directions of further research and new conservation efforts to focus on maintaining aspects of landscape connectivity important to pollinators.