How The Nature Conservancy Helps Save Pollinators

Project Hive Pet Company’s mission is to save the bees. Since our launch in 2021, through the sale of our USA-made dog toys and treats, we’ve helped plant about 35 million square feet of wildflowers that nourish and sustain bees—and other pollinators. But we cannot accomplish our mission alone. We can’t just plant healthy habitat all over North America and expect results. We are part of an entire network of businesses, nonprofits, governmental entities, and organizations that recognize that most of our food supply depends on pollinators. 

We’ve written about nonprofits that focus specifically on saving pollinators, like The Pollinator Partnership, the Xerces Society, and the University of Minnesota Bee Lab.

Many other conservation-minded organizations may not call out saving bees and pollinators as their primary mission, but they still help pollinators through land conservation efforts. In a recent article, we wrote about how Trust for Public Land helps pollinators. Here, we’re focusing on how The Nature Conservancy’s work has a huge impact on pollinators. (If you’re reading this and think we should write about another organization that helps save the bees, please let us know!) We were lucky to connect with two experts from The Nature Conservancy: Chris Helzer, Director of Science and Stewardship for Nebraska, and Dr. Marissa Ahlering, Science Director for the Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota Chapter. 

What is the Nature Conservancy?

Founded in 1951, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is one of the world’s largest and most influential environmental nonprofits. How big? According to their most recent financial statements from their annual report, The Nature Conservancy has over $9.8 billion in assets, including over $5 billion in conservation lands and easements. They raised about $1.2 billion to support their mission: “conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends,” and their website says they’ve protected more than 125 million acres of land—about twice the size of the State of Colorado.  

To get a sense of the scale of how much TNC protects land, check out this map that shows their massive network of nature preserves. TNC aptly describes them as “places where wildlife thrives, ecosystems are restored and people can connect with nature in meaningful ways.”

What are The Nature Conservancy's Priorities?

The Nature Conservancy is focused on addressing the issues of climate change and biodiversity loss through ambitious goals of protecting land, ocean, and fresh water. 

To tackle climate change, TNC is focusing on nature-based solutions. For example, the area of Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota has a “total opportunity area of 4.2 million suitable acres for reforestation.” Planting trees is an effective and lasting solution to capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions. Their reforestation hub provides a handy online tool to understand the opportunity for planting trees in each state, broken down type of land (e.g., floodplains, urban open space, grassy areas, etc.), and land ownership (e.g., state, federal, private, etc.). Privately held pasture and urban open space represent a vast majority of the opportunity in Minnesota, so that’s where TNC focuses its efforts in this state. 

To reverse the loss of biodiversity in nature, TNC is working with communities all over the globe to protect lands and oceans. TNC elaborates on its 2030 goals in this 5-minute video.

Why are Pollinators so Important?

Project Hive’s first blog post addressed the question: why do we need to save the bees? While bees are some of the most important pollinators, we rely on many other pollinators—like moths, wasps, butterflies, beetles, hummingbirds, and bats—to pollinate our fruits and vegetables. 

Chirs Helzer, The Nature Conservancy’s Director of Science and Stewardship for Nebraska, explains more: “Pollinators are a crucial component of ecosystems because they facilitate seed production by the majority of our plant species. Those seeds vital for plant reproduction, and thus for sustaining plant species and communities, of course, but they’re also a huge source of food for many other species, from birds and mice to insects and even fungi.”

Why do Pollinators Need Saving?

Most pollinators feed on nectar and pollen, and their natural habitat has been declining. According to The Bee & Butterfly Habitat Fund, “almost 24 million acres of grassland were converted into crop ground in the last decade, taking valuable habitat away from pollinators and other wildlife.” (That’s why Project Hive is planting habitat.)

Loss of biodiversity is also a significant issue impacting pollinators, as pollinators depend on biodiversity. Chris Helzer elaborates:

“Most directly, pollinators rely upon a wide variety of plant species being available because most pollinators don’t just feed from one kind of flower, and they are alive for longer than the blooming time for any single wildflower species.  That means that as one flowering species stops being available, there have to be others to take its place.  In addition, pollinators thrive best when they can regulate the nutritional qualities of their pollen/nectar diet (and, in the case of bees, the diet of their larvae).  When they have a variety of flowering species to choose from, pollinators can optimize their nutrition.

Less directly, biodiversity matters to pollinators because of all the interconnected networks that keep ecosystems working – including the plant diversity pollinators rely upon. We need lots of different predators, herbivores, granivores, and detritivores, along with an abundance in every other role filled by species. That diversity provides redundancy and strength across complex networks and allows ecosystems to absorb impacts, adapt to change, and keep humming along. That means those ecosystems can support all the species that rely on them, including pollinators and humans.

The upshot of all this is that when we have a strong, diverse pollinator community, it’s a good sign that the ecosystem they live in is doing well. Similarly, if we have a healthy ecosystem, pollinators will do well.” 

How Does The Nature Conservancy Help Pollinators?

Dr. Marissa Ahlering, Science Director for The Nature Conservancy in MN, SD, and ND says, "Benefits to pollinators are inherently baked into much of the work that The Nature Conservancy does." She continues:

“TNC strives to support ecological function and biodiversity of ecosystems through land and water protection and management, and pollinators are a key component to that biodiversity—as species themselves, as links in the food web, and as facilitators of reproduction for numerous plant species that provide food and habitat for people and wildlife.

Protection of lands at risk of conversion to other uses, such as intensive agricultural row crop production is an important strategy to keep pollinator habitat on the landscape. The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota recently reached a milestone of 1 million acres of land protected, all of which provides habitat for different types of pollinators in the different ecosystems across these three states.”

TNC recognizes the value pollinators provide: over $235 billion in services to the U.S. agriculture industry. TNC also recognizes their plight: “loss, fragmentation, and degradation of habitat,” according to this TNC article quoting Chris Helzer. Helzer explains:

“When pollinators can find large, connected and florally-diverse habitats and aren’t exposed to pesticides, they are better able to cope with disease and other stressors. When habitat is broken up into little pieces, pollinators have fewer resources available to them; they are found in smaller, more vulnerable populations; and they are exposed to all the risks of pesticides and other human-caused threats coming in from the edges of those habitats. Restoring large blocks of habitat with good plant diversity will go a long way toward fixing the big problems.”

What's one specific example of a TNC conservation project that provides pollinator habitat?

I asked Chris Helzer for a specific example of their work in the United States. “At the Platte River Prairies,” he writes, “The Nature Conservancy has converted approximately 1,500 acres of cropland into high-diversity restored prairie, using seed mixes of between 150 and 200 plant species. The goal is to use restored habitat to fill in around fragments of prairie in a heavily cultivated landscape. Surveys have shown that bees in those unplowed prairie fragments are moving into and using the restored habitat.” 

What if I were a bee?

Chris Helzer ended with a perfect visual. “On the sites we manage here in Nebraska, one of the ways we evaluate our land management is to look at an area through the eyes of a bee.  ‘If I were a bee, would I be able to find what I need?’  If we ask that question multiple times through a season, it helps us make sure we’re managing in a way that provides a consistent, diverse supply of wildflowers throughout the season.”

We look outside and ask the same thing—which is why Project Hive advocates for transforming lawns into backyard pollinator gardens. Backyard yard gardens are important and fun and beautiful, but typically, they’re smaller-scale.  We’re thankful that organizations like The Nature Conservancy are working on protecting and restoring biodiversity, native grasslands, and wildflower habitat across the world—because humans and pollinators need food to survive!