Why is Pollination Important

Short answer

• Pollination is the movement of pollen from the male part of a flower, the anther, to the female part, the stigma. That transfer makes fertilization possible, and fertilization makes seeds and fruit possible.
• Pollination matters because most flowering plants cannot complete that step alone. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) states that approximately 87.5 percent of flowering plants are pollinated by animals, and that pollinators affect about 35 percent of world crop production by volume.
• The result reaches far beyond the garden. Animal pollinated plants include many fruits, vegetables, nuts and oil crops, and wild flowering plants that feed and shelter other wildlife. When pollination fails, a plant may still flower, but it can produce fewer seeds, smaller or misshapen fruit, or no fruit at all.
• Pollination does not support every food equally. Wind pollinated grains such as wheat and corn do not depend on animal pollinators in the same way, so a world without pollinators would not lose all food. It would lose much of its variety, and the vitamin rich crops that depend most on animal pollination would be hit hardest.
• Pollinators face habitat loss, pesticide exposure, pests and disease, invasive species and climate change. Protecting them in general terms means protecting varied flowering habitat, keeping a sequence of blooms through the season, and using pest control with care so that it does not remove the plants and insects the system depends on.

What Pollination Actually Is

Pollination is often described as bees visiting flowers, and bees are central to the story, but the definition is simpler and wider than that image. Pollination is the transfer of pollen, the fine grains that carry a plant’s male reproductive cells, from an anther to a stigma. The anther is the pollen producing part of a flower. The stigma is the receptive surface that receives pollen. When compatible pollen lands on a stigma, fertilization can follow, and fertilization is what allows a flower to develop seeds and, in many plants, fruit around those seeds.

That distinction matters. A flower is not the end of the process. It is the plant’s way of attracting a carrier, or of releasing pollen into wind or water, so that reproduction can happen. The United States Forest Service puts the point plainly: pollen may look like insignificant yellow dust, but it is a vital link in the reproductive cycle of seed plants, from cone bearing trees to familiar flowering plants.

It also helps to separate three terms that are often mixed up. Pollination is the movement of pollen. Fertilization is the joining of reproductive cells that follows a successful transfer. A pollinator is the animal, or the wind or water current, that carries the pollen. A plant can be pollinated without being fertilized, for example if the pollen is from an incompatible plant, or if drought, extreme heat or disease interrupts the process after pollen arrives. The United States Forest Service notes exactly that qualification: other factors may prevent full fruit and seed production even after pollination has occurred.

Pollination therefore sits at the start of a chain, not at the end of it. Seeds carry the next generation of plants. Fruit, in many species, protects those seeds and helps move them to new ground, often because an animal eats the fruit and later deposits the seed elsewhere. Break the first link and the rest of the chain weakens, even if soil, water and sunlight remain available. The Forest Service makes that point for wild plants in fragmented landscapes: without pollinators, existing plant populations would decline even if other life sustaining elements were present.

How Pollination Works, Step by Step

A flowering plant’s basic problem is that it cannot walk to a mate. It is rooted in place, so it must either move its own pollen within a flower, accept pollen from another flower on the same plant, or rely on an outside carrier to bring pollen from a different plant of the same species. Each option has a different effect on the plant’s offspring.

Self pollination happens when pollen moves within a single flower, or between flowers on the same plant. It is reliable, because it does not depend on a visitor arriving at the right time, and it can let a plant set seed even when pollinators are scarce. Its drawback is genetic sameness. Offspring resemble the parent closely, which leaves less variation for the population to draw on if conditions change.

Cross pollination happens when pollen moves between flowers on different plants of the same species. That mixing produces seeds with a wider range of genetic combinations. The Forest Service lists genetic diversity as one of the direct benefits of adequate pollination, alongside enough seeds for dispersal and fruit that is adequate to attract seed dispersers. Genetic diversity is not an abstract benefit. A population with more variation is more likely to contain individuals that tolerate a new disease, a dry summer or a shift in flowering time, and those individuals are the ones that survive to reproduce.

The sequence inside the flower follows a regular pattern. A pollinator visits a flower to collect nectar, pollen or both. Pollen sticks to its body, often because animal pollinated pollen is sticky or barbed rather than smooth and light. When the same animal visits another flower of the same species, some of that pollen brushes onto the stigma. If the pollen is compatible, a pollen tube grows and fertilization follows. Seeds form, and in fruiting plants the flower’s ovary develops into fruit. The Pollinator Partnership describes the same sequence in short form: the transfer of pollen in and between flowers of the same species leads to fertilization and successful seed and fruit production.

Timing is part of the mechanism too. Plants have evolved flowering times spread across the growing season, which reduces competition for pollinators and gives pollinators a continuing food supply. The Forest Service describes flowers available from the first warmth of late winter through spring and summer until autumn, providing pollen and nectar in exchange for the pollination service. When flowering and pollinator activity fall out of step, for example because a warm spring brings blooms earlier than the insects that visit them normally emerge, some flowers go unvisited and some insects emerge to find little food. That mismatch is one of the climate related risks described later in this article.

Who Does the Work: Animals, Wind and Water

About 80 percent of all plant pollination is by animals, according to the Forest Service, with the remaining share mostly by wind and a small share by water. That figure uses all plant pollination as its base. FAO’s higher figure, approximately 87.5 percent of flowering plants pollinated by animals, uses flowering plants as its base. The two numbers describe different groups, so they do not contradict each other, and this article keeps the base of each figure attached to the figure itself.

Bees are the most important animal pollinators in most systems, and FAO counts more than 25,000 bee species, most of them wild rather than managed. The variety matters because different bees work in different ways. Some are generalists that visit many flower types. Others specialize in particular flowers. Some nest in the ground, others in cavities in wood or stems. Readers who want the range in more detail can start with the different kinds of bees described in Different Kinds of Bees, which sets out how far bee diversity extends beyond the familiar honey bee.

Honey bees are managed pollinators, moved by beekeepers to crops that need them, but they are only part of the system. Wild native bees do a large share of pollination in natural habitats and in many crops, and they often visit flowers in weather or at hours when honey bees are less active. What bees eat, and why flowers matter to them as food rather than only as a workplace, is covered in What Do Bees Eat. The exchange runs both ways: the bee gains protein rich pollen and carbohydrate rich nectar, and the plant gains a carrier that moves its pollen to another flower.

Butterflies and moths are pollinators as well, although their role is often smaller for a single crop than that of bees. Butterflies feed mainly as adults, sipping nectar through a long mouthpart, and pollen can stick to their bodies as they move between flowers. Moths do similar work at night, including for flowers that open after dark and release scent in the evening. The butterfly life cycle, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to adult, explains why butterfly pollination depends on more than nectar flowers alone: caterpillars need host plants to eat, while adults need nectar to fuel flight and reproduction.

Flies, beetles, wasps and other insects also pollinate, and some flowers are shaped specifically for them. Beetles are among the oldest pollinators, visiting flowers that are open, bowl shaped and easy to enter. Flies visit a wide range of flowers, including some that bees pass over. Wasps and other insects can be effective carriers even when they are better known for other roles. Yellow jackets, for example, are often thought of only as pests, but the question of whether they pollinate at all is answered, with its limits, in Are Yellow Jackets Pollinators.

Birds and bats extend pollination beyond insects. Hummingbirds visit tubular flowers, hovering as they feed, and carry pollen on their foreheads and bills. In warmer regions, sunbirds and honeycreepers do similar work. Bats pollinate flowers that open at night, including some cactus flowers and the flowers of plants that produce fruit eaten by people and wildlife. FAO also lists non flying mammals among vertebrate pollinators, including some rodents, lemurs and tree squirrels, a reminder that the pollinator group is far wider than the insects most people picture.

Wind and water complete the picture without any animal at all. Wind pollinated plants, such as oaks, birches and cottonwoods, generally produce small, green, inconspicuous flowers in large numbers and release very large amounts of light, smooth pollen, as the Forest Service describes. They tend to grow in large populations, which improves the chance that wind blown pollen reaches a female flower. Grasses, including many grain crops, are wind pollinated in this way. Water pollination is rare and limited to aquatic plants. The Forest Service puts the abiotic split at about 98 percent wind and 2 percent water, within the roughly 20 percent of plant pollination that is not animal mediated.

Why Pollination Matters for Food

The food argument is the one most people meet first, and it is strong, but it needs its scope stated clearly. FAO states that three quarters of the world’s most productive crop plants depend, at least in part, on pollinators, and that pollinators affect 35 percent of world crop production by volume. On its about page, FAO adds that pollinators increase the output of 87 of the 115 leading food crops worldwide, and that about 75 percent of global food crop types depend on pollinators. Those are different measures: share of productive crop plants, share of production by volume, and share of crop types. Each answers a different question, and none of them means that 75 percent or 35 percent of every meal depends on pollinators.

What animal pollination does for crops is threefold: quantity, quality and variety. Adequate pollination generally produces more fruit and seed, because more flowers are fertilized and more seeds develop. It also improves quality, because well pollinated fruit tends to be larger, better shaped and more fully developed than fruit from incompletely pollinated flowers. The Forest Service notes that visits from bees and other pollinators result in larger, more flavorful fruits and higher crop yields. FAO adds that pollinator dependent plants are responsible for many micronutrients and vitamins important in human nutrition and dietary diversity, which is why a decline in pollination is a nutrition question as well as a farming question.

The crops involved are familiar. FAO’s account covers orchards, horticultural crops and forage crops, as well as seed production for many root and fiber crops. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) gives everyday examples in its own explanation: coffee, peaches, apples, almonds, dates, cashews and tomatoes are all presented as foods that depend on pollinators. Other widely cited examples include blueberries, cherries, melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, sunflowers and canola. The pattern is that animal pollination matters most for fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and oil crops, the foods that add variety, flavor and micronutrients to a diet, rather than for the bulk calories that come from wind pollinated grains.

That distinction is the key to an honest answer to the question in the title. A world with no animal pollinators would not lose wheat, rice or corn in the same way, because those grains do not rely on animal pollination for their main yield. It would lose much of the choice and nutritional range around those staples. Some crops would fall sharply, some would become scarcer and more expensive, and some varieties that depend heavily on a particular pollinator could become impractical to grow at scale. FAO warns in those terms: a decline in pollinators could affect the availability and cost of vitamin rich crops, potentially leading to more unbalanced diets.

A related phrase needs care. It is often said that one in every three bites of food depends on pollinators. USGS uses that phrasing, and it is a useful shorthand for the scale of dependence, but it is not a precise measurement of any single person’s diet. A diet heavy in grains and meat would show a lower share, while a diet rich in fruit, vegetables and nuts would show a higher share. The defensible version of the claim is the one FAO gives with its base attached: about 35 percent of world crop production by volume is affected by pollinators, and about 75 percent of global food crop types depend on them, at least in part.

Why Pollination Matters Beyond the Farm

Food is only one part of the answer, and in ecological terms it may not be the largest part. Wild flowering plants depend on pollinators just as crops do, and those plants form the base of many food webs. FAO states that the vast majority of flowering plant species only produce seeds if animal pollinators move pollen from anthers to stigmas, and warns that without that service many species and processes within an ecosystem would collapse. USGS states the same risk for native plants: about three quarters of all native plants in the world require pollination by an animal, most often an insect and most often a native bee, and without pollinators moving pollen from flower to flower, about 75 percent of all native North American plants could gradually become extinct as they lose the ability to reproduce.

The chain from plant to animal is direct. Seeds feed birds and small mammals. Fruit feeds a still wider set of animals, which in turn disperse seeds. Leaves, stems and roots shelter insects, nesting birds and other wildlife. If a plant population stops producing seed, it cannot replace itself when old plants die, and the animals that relied on it must move, switch food or decline. Over time, that changes the composition of a habitat: plants that can self pollinate or rely on wind keep reproducing, while animal pollinated species fade, and the habitat becomes simpler and less able to support the range of life it once held.

Pollination also supports the wider services that plant communities provide, though the link is indirect and should be stated as such. Flowering plants help hold soil with their roots, buffer rainfall with their foliage, and take part in the water cycle by returning moisture to the atmosphere, as the Forest Service describes. They also produce oxygen through photosynthesis and store carbon as they grow. Pollinators do not do those jobs directly. They make them possible at scale by letting plant populations reproduce and persist. Lose the pollinators, and the plant cover that performs those services thins over generations, even if no one cuts a tree or plows a field in the meantime.

There is a cultural layer too, which the Forest Service records in detail. Native peoples have long recognized pollinators and pollinated plants through food plants, medicinal plants, plant based dyes and cultural symbolism, with butterflies, moths and hummingbirds carrying meanings that vary by community. That history is a reminder that pollination is not only a modern agricultural input. It has shaped diets, materials and stories for far longer than commercial beekeeping or modern farming.

What Happens When Pollination Fails

Pollination failure does not usually arrive as a single dramatic event. It arrives as a partial shortfall: fewer visits, visits at the wrong time, or visits by the wrong species for a particular flower. The effects follow a gradient rather than an on or off switch.

At the mild end, a plant produces fewer seeds than it could have, or fruit that is smaller or less evenly formed. A gardener may notice that a squash plant flowers well but sets little fruit, or that apples on one tree are misshapen while those on another are full. At the more serious end, a plant population produces so little seed that it cannot replace itself, and its numbers fall year by year. In crops, the equivalent is a yield that is lower than the variety is capable of, even when water, nutrients and pest control are adequate. The cause is easy to miss, because the plants look healthy. They have simply not been pollinated well enough.

Complete failure is rarer, but it happens for plants that depend heavily on a single pollinator, or for isolated populations where no compatible pollen arrives at all. In those cases, flowers may bloom and then drop without setting fruit, and no seed is produced for the next season. For wild plants, that can mean local disappearance, especially if the surrounding habitat is fragmented and new seeds cannot arrive from elsewhere. For crops, it can mean a failed planting or a variety that is abandoned because it cannot be relied on.

Pollination failure also interacts with other stresses. A plant weakened by drought may produce less nectar, which attracts fewer pollinators, which leads to poorer pollination, which leaves less seed for the next generation. An insect population reduced by pesticide exposure may still visit flowers, but less efficiently, or may avoid treated areas altogether. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service notes that poor nutrition and pesticide exposure can intensify the effect of diseases on pollinators, so a single stress rarely acts alone.

It is worth stating what pollination failure does not do. It does not make soil infertile, stop photosynthesis or remove plants overnight. A mature tree that is poorly pollinated in one year may flower again the next. A perennial plant may persist vegetatively, spreading by roots or runners, even when it sets little seed. The damage is cumulative and generational: fewer seeds this year means fewer young plants next year, and a population that keeps underproducing seed will shrink even if adult plants look unchanged.

The Threats to Pollinators, in General Terms

Pollinators face several pressures at once, and the institutions that track them list a consistent set. FAO names habitat loss and fragmentation, intensive farming, monocultures, pesticides, pests, diseases and climate change impacts such as temperature extremes and flowering time shifts. The Fish and Wildlife Service groups the threats in the United States under fewer places to feed and breed, imported species and diseases, pesticides and climate change. The United States Department of Agriculture’s climate hubs add invasive species to the same list for the Northwest, alongside habitat loss, pesticides and climate change. Different sources weight the threats differently by region, but the list itself is stable.

Habitat loss is the most widely cited threat. As native vegetation is replaced by roadways, manicured lawns, crops and non native gardens, pollinators lose the food and nesting sites they need, as the Fish and Wildlife Service describes. Remaining patches of prairie and meadow become more disconnected, which makes it harder for pollinators to reach new breeding sites or find better habitat. For ground nesting bees, even the surface matters: loose, undisturbed soil is a nesting requirement, and heavily trampled or paved ground removes it. For cavity nesting bees, the removal of dead wood and hollow stems removes nesting sites just as surely.

Pesticides are a second pressure, and the guidance from the Fish and Wildlife Service is careful rather than absolute. Pesticides can help control crop pests and invasive species, but improper use can harm pollinators and other wildlife. The recommended approach in general terms is to use pesticides only when necessary, use the minimum amount required to be effective, and target the application so that only the intended pest is affected. That framing matters for this article, which makes no product recommendations: the point is that timing, placement and dose decide much of the risk, and that a treatment applied while bees are actively foraging on open flowers carries more risk than the same treatment applied with those factors in mind.

Pests, diseases and invasive species add a third pressure. Invasive plants crowd out native ones, reducing food and shelter for pollinators, and disease causing organisms, including viruses, fungi and bacteria, can spread from non native to native pollinators, as the Fish and Wildlife Service notes. Other stressors can intensify the effect of disease, so a population already short of food or exposed to pesticides may cope worse with an infection than a healthy population would.

Climate change acts through timing and extremes. Flowers bloom earlier as temperatures warm, which can cost some pollinators the opportunity to feed, especially insects that feed only on specific plants, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. If blooms die before those insects arrive, the insects go hungry and fewer plants get pollinated. Heat waves, cold snaps, drought, wildfire and flooding can all reduce blooms or make pollination harder for temperature sensitive pollinators, as the USDA climate hubs describe for the Northwest. Rising temperatures are also linked by the Fish and Wildlife Service to a decline in North American bumble bees, with numbers reported as having fallen nearly 50 percent since 1974, and the largest losses where temperatures have risen most. That figure is specific to North American bumble bees and to the period since 1974, and it should not be read as a global figure for all pollinators.

The scale of risk is serious, but it should not be overstated into a claim that all pollinators are equally threatened. FAO cites International Union for Conservation of Nature national Red List assessments finding around 40 percent of bees at risk of extinction, and 16.5 percent of vertebrate pollinators at risk globally, while also stating that current extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times above the normal rate due to human activities. Those figures come from assessments that vary in coverage by country and group, so they are best read as evidence of widespread risk, not as a census of every pollinator species. A separate assessment published in 2025 and listed by the USDA Agricultural Research Service found elevated extinction risk in more than a fifth of 1,591 native North American pollinator species studied, with bees the insect group most at risk. The two assessments cover different groups and regions, which is why their percentages differ.

What Protection Looks Like

Protection, in general terms, follows directly from the threats: keep habitat, keep flowers, and reduce the pressures that make both harder to sustain. That principle applies at very different scales, from a single yard to a farming landscape, and this article stays at the level of general practice rather than giving a planting plan. A yard level plan, with the plant choices and layout that attract butterflies in particular, is a different article: How to Attract Butterflies to your Yard, the same wave companion to this explainer. A plant level guide for butterfly visitors is Plants That Attract Butterflies.

The first general principle is diversity through the season. Pollinators need food across their active period, not only in one flush of bloom. A landscape that flowers only in spring leaves summer and autumn pollinators short of food, while a landscape with a sequence of native flowering plants gives different species something to visit as the season progresses. The Forest Service’s flowering calendar, from late winter through autumn, illustrates the idea: different plants flower at different times, and pollinators use them in turn.

The second principle is to protect nesting and shelter as well as food. Food alone does not sustain a pollinator population if there is nowhere to nest, overwinter or shelter from weather and predators. That means undisturbed ground for ground nesters, standing dead wood and hollow stems for cavity nesters, and connected patches of habitat so that pollinators can move between feeding and breeding sites. The Fish and Wildlife Service emphasizes connected habitat for exactly this reason: isolated patches, however flower rich, are harder to reach and easier to lose.

The third principle is care with pest control, as described above: use it only when needed, target it, and keep it away from open flowers while pollinators are active. The fourth is to favor native plants where that is possible, because native pollinators and native plants have evolved together, and native plants are more likely to provide the pollen, nectar and host foliage that local species need. What Flowers Attract Bees and Flowers for Native Bees both take that plant question further for bees in particular, while this article keeps its focus on why the system matters as a whole.

None of this requires a reader to keep bees, plant a meadow or change a whole landscape. Small steps fit the same principles: leaving a patch of ground undisturbed, letting some plants flower before cutting them back, and choosing a mix of plants that bloom at different times. USGS notes that adding native flowering plants to even the smallest yard can help, and that the pollen and nectar from only about five flowers supports the food needs of a bee from egg to adulthood, a vivid reminder that pollinator support does not have to be large scale to be real.

Why the Numbers Differ Between Sources

Readers who search this topic will meet numbers that seem to disagree, and the disagreement is worth explaining rather than hiding. One source may value United States crop pollination at more than 10 billion dollars a year, another at more than 15 billion dollars, and the Pollinator Partnership puts pollinators at 217 billion dollars to the global economy. Those figures differ because they measure different things: different countries, different crop sets, different years, and different methods for valuing a service that is often provided free by wild insects.

The same applies to percentages. FAO’s 87.5 percent refers to flowering plants pollinated by animals. The Forest Service’s roughly 80 percent refers to all plant pollination by animals. USGS’s three quarters refers to native plants requiring animal pollination. Each figure is defensible on its own base, and each becomes misleading if its base is dropped. This article therefore keeps the base with the figure every time, and treats any pollination number quoted without its base as incomplete.

Dates matter too. Older estimates may predate changes in crop prices, farming practice or pollinator populations, and newer assessments may cover different species or regions. The honest way to use these figures is the way this article uses them: as a range of evidence pointing in the same direction, that animal pollination supports a large share of flowering plants, a large share of crop types, and a substantial share of crop production by volume, rather than as a single exact price tag for nature.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is pollination in simple terms?

Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the anther of a flower to the stigma of a flower. If the pollen is compatible, fertilization follows, and the plant can produce seeds and fruit. Without that transfer, most flowering plants cannot reproduce by seed.

Why is pollination important for humans?

Pollination is important for humans because it supports the production of many fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and oil crops, and because it lets wild flowering plants reproduce. FAO states that pollinators affect about 35 percent of world crop production by volume and increase the output of 87 of the 115 leading food crops. Beyond food, the wild plants that depend on pollinators feed and shelter wildlife and help maintain the plant cover that holds soil and supports ecosystems.

What would happen if there were no pollinators?

There would not be an immediate loss of all food, because wind pollinated grains would still produce. What would follow is a narrowing of food choice and a decline in wild flowering plants. Many fruits, vegetables and nuts would become scarcer and more expensive, some crops would fall sharply in yield and quality, and plant populations that depend on animal pollination would shrink over generations as they failed to produce enough seed to replace themselves.

Do all plants need pollinators?

No. Some plants self pollinate, some are wind pollinated and a few are water pollinated. Grasses and many trees rely on wind. What needs animal pollinators is most flowering plants: FAO puts the share at approximately 87.5 percent of flowering plants, and USGS puts the share of native plants requiring animal pollination at about three quarters. The plants that do not need animals are the exception, not the rule, among flowering species.

Which pollinators matter most?

Bees matter most in most systems, including both managed honey bees and the far larger number of wild native bee species. Butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, wasps, birds and bats also matter, and for particular plants they may matter most of all, for example moths for night opening flowers and bats for some night blooming desert and tropical plants. Diversity itself matters, because different pollinators visit different flowers, work in different weather and are active at different times.

Can a plant be pollinated but still produce no fruit?

Yes. Pollination is only the first step. Drought, extreme temperature, disease or incompatible pollen can prevent full fruit and seed production after pollen has arrived, as the Forest Service notes. Poor pollination can also produce partial results, such as smaller or misshapen fruit, rather than no fruit at all.

How can I help pollinators without keeping bees?

In general terms, provide varied native flowers across the season, protect nesting places such as undisturbed ground and hollow stems, keep habitat patches connected where possible, and use pest control only when needed, targeted, and kept away from open flowers while pollinators are active. For a butterfly focused yard plan, see How to Attract Butterflies to your Yard.

Sources & references

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Global Action on Pollination Services for Sustainable Agriculture, home page: three quarters of the world's most productive crop plants depend at least in part on pollinators; 35 percent of world crop production by volume is affected by pollinators; 200,000 animal species act as pollinators, including more than 25,000 bee species; more than 80 percent of flowering plant species are pollinated by animals. https://www.fao.org/pollination/en/
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Global Action on Pollination Services for Sustainable Agriculture, about page: approximately 87.5 percent of flowering plants are pollinated by animals; pollinators contribute approximately 35 percent of global crop production by volume and increase the yield of 87 of 115 major food crops; about 75 percent of global food crop types depend on pollinators; threats listed as habitat loss and fragmentation, intensive farming, monocultures, pesticides, pests, diseases and climate change. https://www.fao.org/pollination/about/en
• United States Forest Service, Why is Pollination Important: virtually all seed plants need pollination; adequate pollination supports reproduction, genetic diversity and fruit for seed dispersers; about 80 percent of plant pollination is by animals, with abiotic pollination split about 98 percent wind and 2 percent water; flowering plants help purify water, prevent erosion and return moisture to the atmosphere. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/wildflowers/pollinators/importance
• United States Geological Survey, Why are pollinating bats, birds, bees, butterflies, and other animals important: about three quarters of native plants require animal pollination; one in every three bites of food; crop values increased by more than 15 billion dollars a year in the United States; about 75 percent of native North American plants could gradually become extinct without pollinators. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-pollinating-bats-birds-bees-butterflies-and-other-animals-important?page=0
• United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Threats to Pollinators: habitat shrinking and fragmentation, invasive species and disease, pesticide guidance, climate change and earlier blooming, North American bumble bee numbers down nearly 50 percent since 1974. https://www.fws.gov/our-work/pollinators/threats-pollinators
• United States Department of Agriculture, Northwest Climate Hub, Northwest Pollinators and Climate Change: Northwest pollinators declining due to habitat loss, invasive species, pesticides and climate change; extreme weather and timing shifts affecting blooms and pollinators. https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/NW_Pollinators%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf
• Pollinator Partnership, What are Pollinators: pollination as transfer of pollen within and between flowers of the same species leading to fertilization and seed and fruit production. https://www.pollinator.org/pollination
• Cornelisse et al. 2025, Elevated extinction risk in over one-fifth of native North American pollinators, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(14) e2418742122, as listed by USDA Agricultural Research Service: elevated extinction risk in 21.8 percent of 1,591 native North American pollinator species studied, with bees the insect group most at risk. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2418742122