Regenerative management enhances pollinator communities in commercial perennial farms across multiple seasons

Abstract

Agricultural intensification is one of the primary drivers of global pollinator decline, yet empirical evidence for the effectiveness of biodiversity-oriented management under real commercial farming conditions remains scarce. This study evaluates the effects of a multi-species cover crop mixture, implemented as a regenerative soil management strategy in the inter-row spaces of five commercial perennial farms across Mediterranean Spain, on pollinator abundance, species richness, family richness, and community composition over three consecutive growing seasons (2020–2023). Standardized Malaise trapping yielded a total of 18,483 pollinator individuals comprising 167 species, 97 genera, and 42 families across four orders. Regenerative management consistently enhanced all pollinator metrics relative to conventional bare-soil management. Abundance increased more than threefold overall, with a 5.7-fold increase in olive systems and a 2.2-fold increase in stone fruit systems. Species richness more than doubled and family richness increased by 80% under regenerative management. Community composition differed significantly between management treatments, with qualitative shifts in pollinator assemblages detected across all farms and seasons. These responses were robust across contrasting crop types and remained ecologically meaningful throughout the study period, despite a general temporal decline in pollinator metrics across seasons. The magnitude of the management effect was particularly pronounced in structurally simplified superintensive olive orchards, where baseline pollinator communities were most impoverished under conventional tillage. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that carefully designed native cover crop mixtures can generate substantial and consistent gains in pollinator diversity and abundance under operational agricultural conditions, and support the incorporation of evidence-based cover crop strategies into agri-environment policy frameworks as a practical and scalable tool for mitigating the ecological consequences of agricultural intensification on insect pollinators and the ecosystem services they underpin.