Mapping the dependency of crops on pollinators in Belgium

Background
Because of their pollinating activity, insect pollinators provide an ecosystem service that is essential to ecosystems and our economy. A large majority of the flowering plants we consume depends on it. In turn, the decline in pollinators observed for the last decades in Belgium as in many other European countries threatens agriculture and human well-being.
New information
Here we evaluate the pollination service at a country-wide scale through the estimated value of the contribution of insect pollination to the production used for human consumption in Belgium using crop dependency ratios. We then mapped the vulnerability of crops in the face of pollinator decline at the provincial level. We show that the part of plant production for human food that we can attribute to the action of insect pollinators represents a value of about 251.6 million euros in 2010 in Belgium. As a result, 11.1 % of total value of Belgian plant production (in terms of fruit quantity and quality) depend on pollinators.