Facilitating pollination in native seed production: the why, the who, where, and how of designing seed production areas to support pollinators

Native seed production areas (SPAs) are dedicated to growing plants for the purpose of harvesting seed and play an increasingly important role in seed supply to achieve restoration targets. While there is extensive literature on enhancing pollinators in agricultural contexts, there has been limited research on supporting pollinators in SPAs, despite their potential importance to the quantity and quality of seed produced. Here, we review the literature on the factors that influence the ability of SPAs to support target pollinator species and present a framework to practically guide the design of SPAs for enhancing pollinators and pollination. These factors include landscape context, plant density and arrangement, habitat resources, supplementary resources for pollinators and species choice for companion plants. We also present a stepwise decision‐making process for supporting pollinators that includes identifying visitors to the target plant, the food resources required for potential pollinator species and their degree of specialization, if the activity season of the potential pollinator overlaps with the target plant species, and their nesting requirements. We then provide an example of a plant species in a SPA in Western Australia to illustrate this process. We discuss the limitations of current knowledge and highlight when reasonable inferences can be made to facilitate and enhance SPAs for pollinators. Supporting pollinators in native seed production provides a two‐fold benefit for biodiversity conservation—first through enhancing seed production for ecological restoration, and secondly, by helping to tackle the current global pollinator crisis.