The dramatic honey bee colony losses reported in Europe and around the world in the last fifteen years, which has attracted the public attention, is hiding a much wider problem: an evident decline in the presence and diversity of all wild pollinators, including wild bees, hoverflies, beetles, butterflies and moths. In Europe, several initiatives have been adopted at European and national level to halt this trend, however, we still miss a reliable method to assess their efficacy. In addition, there are still important gaps in data and information regarding the state of several pollinator species, the main causes of their decline and the consequences for nature and human well-being. For these reasons, it would be necessary to improve the knowledge about the effectiveness of mitigation measures for biodiversity pollinator restoration proposed by European strategies. In the ÆM-POLLY project we aim to develop and validate an integrated protocol as a tool to verify if the mitigation measures foreseen by the EU Green Deal for agricultural practices, are effective in halting and reversing the decline of wild pollinator biodiversity. This monitoring protocol will integrate endpoints in terms of presence, abundance and diversity of wild pollinator species with endpoints able to assess the state of health at the sub-individual, individual and population level. These endpoints are selected and designed to diagnose biological alterations in wild pollinators due to different pressures: chemical stress from pesticides, stress linked to climate changes, food and water deficiencies, habitat loss and diseases. Results expected will be innovative, covering several gaps on wild pollinator biodiversity, their health status and on the monitoring of the effectiveness of mitigation actions designed to halt and reverse biodiversity decline. Such an integrated approach using a set of biomarkers was never applied before to wild pollinators. From ÆM-POLLY project we expect to: 1) obtain a dataset of baseline biomarker values related to the health status of representative pollinator species 2) assess the effectiveness of the mitigation measures by comparing the pollinator diversity and the biomarkers related to their health in 2 types of crops selected in the project (orchards and vineyards); 3) define a final integrated monitoring protocol to assess the health status of wild pollinators and their biodiversity; 4) develop user-friendly guidelines for environmental and agricultural agencies, phytosanitary services regulatory bodies and policy makers, as a sensitive tool to assess the effectiveness of the different mitigation measures in different agroecosystems, to guide decisions and inform policies.
