The following describes a protocol to be applied to focal crops at the farm scale level to (i) detect and assess pollination deficits in field situations in a standard and statistically testable way; and (ii) draw management conclusions from the proposed experiment for possible action to eliminate or at least reduce these deficits. it can also be used simply to assess pollinator density and diversity on a focal crop for comparison purposes among different sites. Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the producing anthers to the receptive stigma and it is an essential preliminary step for the sexual reproduction of flowering plants. pollination level can be precisely measured as the number of compatible and viable pollen grains that reach a stigma during the effective pollination period, and it is therefore directly related to yield for all crops in which the output is a product of sexual reproduction. indeed, pollination management should be regarded as a production factor in its own right for all these crops as it can affect the agronomic yield and its many components such as fruit set and seed set, fruit quality (e.g. size, aspect, sugar content, flavor, and nutritional content), seed quality (e.g. germination rate, oil content), and other characteristics such as earliness and uniformity of output (e.g. rape Brassica napus l.: lerin 1982, sabbath et al. 2006), market value and profitability, and finally the environmental and societal impacts of a crop (McGregor 1976; Free 1993).
