Agri-environmental interventions enhance climatic niche complementarity and resilience of wild crop pollinator communities

How diverse pollinator communities may promote resilience of crop pollination services in the face of increased climatic variability and to what extent such climatic resilience could be fostered through management options remains largely unexplored. Here, we address these research gaps using sweet cherry as a model crop. We quantified flower visitation by bee pollinators under the full range of variable temperature conditions throughout cherry flowering in 15 conventionally managed orchards chosen along a gradient of extensively managed agri-environment scheme meadows (AES meadows) in surrounding landscapes. Thermal niches for a total of 17 important cherry pollinator species based on 11’483 flower visits were determined. Thermal niche complementarity and resilience of wild bees visiting cherry (i.e. the summed temperature niches of species weighted by their flower visitation frequency), but not thermal niche breadth, was enhanced by the proportion of AES meadows in the landscape. We identified wild bee diversity and the broad thermal niches of bumblebees as important drivers of an enhanced resilience. Fruit set as a proxy of cherry yield was exceptionally low and not significantly influenced by thermal resilience or other tested bee community variables. We hypothesise that adverse weather conditions during fruit development were the main cause. Our study highlights the important role of thermal niche breadth and complementarity of diverse wild pollinator communities in providing resilience to crop flower visitation under variable climatic conditions. Our findings show that agri-environmental interventions can enhance such climatic response diversity and niche complementarity of wild crop pollinators underpinning resilience of crop pollination. • Thermal species niches for a total of 17 important bee cherry pollinator species were determined. • Agri-environmental scheme meadows increase diversity, thermal niche complementarity and resilience of wild cherry pollinators. • Especially bumblebees with broad thermal niches buffer pollination services during cool periods. • Important role of climatic response diversity of wild pollinators underpinning stability of crop pollination.