PollAgri: a new dataset on insect floral visitors of crops in France (first version: from 2004 to 2024)

Animal-mediated pollination is essential to our food system: around 75% of crops worldwide depend, at least partially, on floral visitations by animals for their production. Crop pollinators, primarily insects, display an increasing role in global crop yields as the overall surface of animal pollinated crops grows. Yet, insects experience a massive decline worldwide, and pollinators such as bees and dipterans make no exception, potentially threatening crop yield and food security. Identifying insect floral visitors is necessary to build a solid overview of crop-associated pollinators, to enlighten their ecological requirements and the drivers of their subsistence in agricultural landscapes. Surprisingly, while pollinators are central to our food production, basic information on the identity of insect floral visitors remains very limited for many cultivated plants. Here we introduce the first version of a centralised and standardised database called PollAgri, that gathers interaction data between insects and flowers of entomophilous crops in a major agricultural country, Metropolitan France. The database aggregates data thanks to a collaboration with the CropPol project, that provides information on crop pollination worldwide, and a call for contributions to our network of researchers and naturalists. Aggregated data was collected from May 2004 to September 2024 from multiple regions in France. PollAgri gathers 80,935 direct interactions involving 417 insect taxa at various taxonomic ranks, from order to species, for 51 species of cultivated plants. This database is a first step towards the identification of floral visitor communities specific to each crop species, a fundamental requirement to better assess the contribution of insects to crop yield. The database helps pinpoint crops, regions and seasons that are under-sampled, orienting future fieldwork. Furthermore, completed with ecological data on these species, PollAgri will help target pollinator-friendly agricultural practices. Hopefully, the database will stimulate research on crop flower visitors, and encourage the community of naturalists and researchers to share their data and help mitigate pollinator decline and its impacts on both ecosystem stability and food security.