Caring For Your Acworth Garden with Natural Insect Repellents

Caring for your Acworth garden with natural insect repellents is a great way to keep pests away while also protecting the environment. Natural insect repellents are an effective and safe alternative to chemical-based products that can be harmful to plants, animals, and humans. In this article, we will discuss some of the best natural insect repellents available and how you can use them to protect your Acworth garden from insects. We will also discuss the benefits of using natural insect repellents and how they can help you maintain a healthy garden without harming the environment.

It remains unclear whether the pollinators will still be able to provide their usual service. That's because plants and their pollinators are intertwined in an elaborate network in which the distribution and abundance of the species involved as well as their seasonal occurrence, physiology, and behavior are finely tuned. Even small changes could throw everything out of balance. Experts thus fear that human influences such as changes in climate and land use could lead to less effective pollination services.

However, because few studies have investigated the interaction between plants and different pollinator groups over longer periods of time, it is difficult to say whether and to what extent such developments are already underway. This makes the more than 120-year-old data from Finland on which the new study is based all the more exciting. Between 1895 and 1900, in the vicinity of Kittilä (a village that lies about 120 km north of the Arctic Circle), forester Frans Silén systematically recorded which insects visited which flowers and how often.

I am passionate about working with historical datasets like this," says Prof. Tiffany Knight from the UFZ. "If you repeat the historic studies again today, it's often the only way to learn about long-term ecological processes." For her, such work also challenges the imagination. "I am trying to understand what motivated the people who collected the data in the past and what challenges they faced," she explains. "This information can then be used to plan a comparable modern study.

The scientists thus first looked around Kittilä for sites where Silén had also made observations -- and where the 17 plant species he studied best still grow today. At these sites, the team repeated the pollinator census in 2018 and 2019. The area remains sparsely populated, and little has changed in terms of land use. However, it has not escaped the consequences of climate change. "We have noticed drastic changes in the networks of pollinators," says Leana Zoller from the MLU. Only 7% of the flower visits observed involved the same species of insects and plants as back then. "That is surprisingly little," says Zoller.