This is a transdisciplinary dataset from ten smallholder farming villages in Patarasi Rural Municipality, Jumla District, Nepal collected during 2021 and 2022. The human component of the dataset includes fortnightly 24-hour dietary recall surveys and monthly anthropometry surveys of 721 participants (adult males, adult females, adolescent girls and children under five) from 200 smallholder households collected over a twelve-month period. For each household, there is also data on socioeconomic status, farming practices, cooking practices and beekeeping practices. The ecological component of the dataset includes plant-pollinator interaction data and flowering phenology data from the same ten farming villages as well as the results of a pollinator exclusion field experiment in fifteen replicate sites along an altitudinal gradient in this region. Taken together, these datasets enable us to understand more about: a) people’s diets, nutritional status and socioeconomic status in rural Nepal; b) which crops provide their nutrients and how these crops are grown; c) which insects pollinate these crops, and; d) how climate change is likely to impact the system.

Despite the importance of insect pollination to produce marketable fruits, insect pollination management is limited by insufficient knowledge about key crop pollinator species. This lack of knowledge is due in part to: 1) the extensive labour involved in collecting direct observations of pollen-transport, 2) the variability of insect assemblages over space and time, and 3) the possibility that pollinators may need access to wild plants as well as crop floral resources. We address these problems using strawberry in the UK as a case study. First, we compare two proxies for estimating pollinator importance: flower visits and pollen transport. Pollen-transport data might provide a closer approximation of pollination service, but visitation data are less time-consuming to collect. Second, we identify insect parameters that are associated with high importance as pollinators, estimated using each of the proxies above. Third, we estimated insects' use of wild plants as well as the strawberry crop. Overall, pollinator importances estimated based on easier-to-collect visitation data were strongly correlated with importances estimated based on pollen loads. Both frameworks suggest that bees Apis and Bombus and hoverflies Eristalis are likely to be key pollinators of strawberries, although visitation data underestimate the importance of bees. Moving beyond species identities, abundant, relatively specialised insects with long active periods are likely to provide more pollination service.    Most insects visiting strawberry plants also carried pollen from wild plants, suggesting that pollinators need diverse floral resources. Identifying essential pollinators or pollinator parameters based on visitation data will reach the same general conclusions as those using pollen transport data, at least in monoculture crop systems. Managers may be able to enhance pollination service by preserving habitats surrounding crop fields to complement pollinators' diets and provide habitats for diverse life stages of wild pollinators.

Grassland fertilisation drives non-random plant loss resulting in areas dominated by perennial grass species. How these changes cascade through linked trophic levels, however, is not well understood. We studied how grassland fertilisation propagates change through the plant assemblage into the plant-flower visitor, plant-leaf miner and leaf miner-parasitoid networks using a year’s data collection from a long-term grassland fertiliser application experiment. Our experiment had three fertiliser treatments each applied to replicate plots 15 m2 in size: mineral fertiliser, farmyard manure, and mineral fertiliser and farmyard manure combined, along with a control of no fertiliser. The combined treatment had the most significant impact, and both plant species richness and floral abundance decreased with the addition of fertiliser. While insect species richness was unaffected by fertiliser treatment, fertilised plots had a significantly higher abundance of leaf miners and parasitoids and a significantly lower abundance of bumblebees. The plant-flower visitor and plant-herbivore networks showed higher values of vulnerability and lower modularity with fertiliser addition, while leaf miner-parasitoid networks showed a rise in generality. The different groups of insects were impacted by fertilisers to varying degrees: while the effect on abundance was the highest for leaf miners, the vulnerability and modularity of flower visitor networks was the most affected. The impact on the abundance of leaf miners was positive and three times higher than the impact on parasitoids, and the impact on bumblebee abundance was negative and double the magnitude of impact on flower abundance. Overall our results show that while insect species richness was unaffected by fertilisers, network structure changed significantly as the replacement of forbs by grasses resulted in changes in relative abundance across trophic levels, with the direction of change depending on the type of network. By studying multiple networks simultaneously, we were able to rank the relative impact of habitat change on the different groups of species within the community. This provided a more holistic picture of the impact of agricultural intensification and provides useful information when deciding on priorities for mitigation. 01-Oct-2020