Pollinator abundance and diversity

Pollinators provide crucial ecosystem services and sustain global food sources. These services are at risk due to recent declines in pollinator populations and diversity.

The key contribution of prior work was in demonstrating how "sublethal" pesticide effects (e.g. impaired reproduction or mobility) impact population decline, whereas pesticide regulation generally concerns lethal doses. Below are some important components of that research.

• Resource-dependent reproduction
• Discrete-time delays (DDE)
• Numerical approximations, proof of convergence
• Investigating sublethal pesticide effects

Ongoing work in this area considers the effect of landscape composition on a suite of pollinators. This work is done in collaboration with Scott Longing's group in PSS, along with Kassandra Gallardo (math PhD student). However, the project is still in preliminary stages.

Publication List

• J.E. Banks, H.T. Banks, N.J. Myers, A.N. Laubmeier, Riccardo Bommarco. Lethal and sublethal effects of toxicants on bumble bee populations: a modelling approach. Ecotoxicology, 2020.
  Contribution Statement: I aided NJM in model revision and generation of preliminary numerical results and provided minor comments in manuscript writing/revision (primarily authored by JEB).


• H.T. Banks, J.E. Banks, Riccardo Bommarco, A.N. Laubmeier, N.J. Myers, Maj Rundlöf, and Kristen Tillman. Analysis of nonlinear delay systems with applications in bumblebee population models. Communication in Applied Analysis, 2017.
  Contribution Statement: I filled minor gaps in the mathematical results for this manuscript (primarily authored by KR and HTB).


• H.T. Banks, J.E. Banks, Riccardo Bommarco, A.N. Laubmeier, N.J. Myers, Maj Rundlöf, Kristen Tillman. Modeling bumble bee population dynamics with delay differential equations. Ecological Modelling, 2017.
  Contribution Statement: I revised mathematical portions of the manuscript during peer review, including significant changes to the model and generation of numerical results.