Summary1. Pollinating insects are globally declining, with one of the main causes being the loss of flowers. With the value of countryside reducing, urban areas, particularly gardens, are increasingly recognized as of benefit to wildlife, including flower-visiting insects. 2. Many gardeners specifically select plant varieties attractive to wildlife. Given the wide public interest, many lists of recommended varieties have been produced by both amateurs and professional organizations, but appear not to be well grounded in empirical data. These lists, however, are not without merit and are an obvious starting point. There is clearly a need to put the process onto a firmer footing based more on data and less on opinion and general experience. 3. We collected data over two summers by counting flower-visiting insects as they foraged on 32 popular summer-flowering garden plant varieties in a specially planted experimental garden, with two smaller additional gardens set up in year two to check the generality of the results. With many thousands of plant varieties available to gardeners in the United Kingdom, and other countries or regions, it would have been an impossible task to make a comprehensive survey resulting in a complete and authoritative list. 4. Our results are valuable and encouraging. Garden flowers attractive to the human eye vary enormously, approximately 100-fold, in their attractiveness to insects. Insects, especially bees and hover flies, can be attracted in large numbers with clear differences in the distribution of types attracted by different varieties. 5. Our results clearly show that there is a great scope for making gardens and parks more beeand insect-friendly by plant selection. Horticulturally modified plant varieties created by plant breeding, including hybrids, are not necessarily less attractive to insects and in some cases are more attractive than their wild-type counterparts. Importantly, all the plants we compared were considered highly attractive to humans, given that they are widely sold as ornamental garden plants. 6. Helping insect pollinators in gardens does not involve extra cost or gardening effort, or loss of aesthetic attractiveness. Furthermore, the methods of quantifying insect-friendliness of plant varieties trialled in this study are relatively simple and can form the basis of further research, including 'citizen science'.

210X.12581Abstract  Citizen science, the involvement of volunteers in collecting of scientific data, can be a useful research tool. However, data collected by volunteers are often of lower quality than that collected by professional scientists. We studied the accuracy with which volunteers identified insects visiting ivy (Hedera) flowers in Sussex, England. In the first experiment, we examined the effects of training method, volunteer background and prior experience. Fifty-three participants were trained for the same duration using one of three different methods (pamphlet, pamphlet + slide show, pamphlet + direct training). Almost immediately following training, we tested the ability of participants to identify live insects on ivy flowers to one of 10 taxonomic categories and recorded whether their identifications were correct or incorrect, without providing feedback. The results showed that the type of training method had a significant effect on identification accuracy (P = 0.008). Participants identified 79.1% of insects correctly after using a one-page colour pamphlet, 85.6% correctly after using the pamphlet and viewing a slide show, and 94.3% correctly after using the pamphlet in combination with direct training in the field. As direct training cannot be delivered remotely, in the following year we conducted a second experiment, in which a different sample of 26 volunteers received the pamphlet plus slide show training repeatedly three times. Moreover, in this experiment participants received c. 2 minutes of additional training material, either videos of insects or stills taken from the videos. Testing showed that identification accuracy increased from 88.6% to 91.3% to 97.5% across the three successive tests.We also found a borderline significant interaction between the type of additional 2 material and the test number (P = 0.053), such that the video gave fewer errors than stills in the first two tests only. The most common errors made by volunteers were misidentifications of honey bees and social wasps with their hover fly mimics. We also tested six experts who achieved nearly perfect accuracy (99.8%), which shows what is possible in practice. Overall, our study shows that two or three sessions of remote training can be as good as one of direct training, even for relatively challenging taxonomic discriminations that include distinguishing models and mimics. IntroductionCitizen science, in which volunteers collect scientific data, is an increasingly popular tool with great potential in research (Dickinson & Bonney 2012; Theobald et al. 2015). By However, citizen science has several challenges. In order for the data to be useful, volunteers generally need training, supervision and overall management. In addition, the data collected by volunteers is often perceived as of low quality and unreliable. For example, in 1993 an amendment was made to prohibit the US National Biological Survey from accepting the work of volunteers, following the assertion by the House of Representatives that "volunteers are i...

Pollinators are in global decline. One of the few ways in which the general public can help is by cultivating ornamental garden plants that attract pollinators by producing nectar, pollen, or both. Advice in the form of lists of recommended plants is available, but how good are these recommendations? Here, we overview a sample of 15 such lists and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. In particular, we found that the range of the number of plant genera per list was large (29-257) and that there was rather little overlap in the recommendations, even among lists addressing the same geographic region (e.g., Britain or North America). Furthermore, the lists often included poor recommendations, omitted many good plants, lacked detail, and were almost invariably based on their authors' general expertize rather than on empirical data. Nevertheless, some advice given in the lists was good, because these recommendations were presumably backed by personal observations and less formally gathered data. The lists were also very appealing to the public, which makes them an excellent tool in communication and a useful starting point for further research.

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1. We examined the effects of reduced mowing on wildflower bloom and flower-visiting insects in the Saltdean Oval, a 6 ha suburban public park in Saltdean, UK.2. In 2012, a novel management regime was initiated in which approximately half the grass area was left uncut, with the plan being to mow it once per year in autumn. In spring 2013, we set up four blocks, with each block subdivided into four 30 9 5 m strips treated under different mowing regimes: (a) regular mowing every 2 weeks all spring and summer, (b) regular mowing until 2 June, (c) regular mowing until 5 July, and (d) no mowing.3. The abundance of both flowers and flower-visiting insects increased significantly with reduced mowing, being ca. 3 and 5 times greater in (d) than (a), respectively, with (b) and (c) intermediate. Mowing intensity, however, had a weak effect on wildflower species richness, which was only lower in (a). 4. A 1 km bee, butterfly, and moth transect walk, 500 m within the long grass part of the park and 500 m within the short, recorded ca. 509 greater insect abundance in the long grass. 5. A questionnaire of public opinion found that 97% of park visitors favoured encouraging insects and wildflowers. In terms of enjoyment of the park, 26% said that it had increased, 64% said that it stayed the same, and 10% said that it decreased. 6. These results present an encouraging example of a potential win-win situation in urban land management change, where the interests of humans and wildlife are aligned, thereby making the goals of conservation easier to achieve.