9 April 2024
VOODOO researchers analysed the structure and robustness to species extinctions of pollinator communities in 12 landscapes in France. Read the summary (key message 4) here and the paper in Functional Ecology.
Wild bee communities are sustained by a diversity of semi-natural habitat in agricultural landscapes
23 November 2023
VOODOO researchers and colleagues at Agroscope and ETH Zurich we analysed bee species richness and species-habitat networks in 25 landscapes in Switzerland to study the relative contribution of semi-natural habitats to wild bee communities in agricultural landscapes. Read the summary here and the paper in Journal of Applied Ecology .
22 November 2023
A VOODOO field experiment by researchers at MLU in Halle shows that commercially-sourced bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) suffer greater mortality when experimentally infected by injection with Deformed Wing Virus (variant A) than when fed the virus, as might be the case when they feed on flower pollen and nectar. For more see our library and the paper . This highlights the need to understand better the mode of viral transmission and infection among species and to examine other impacts...
22 November 2023
Alongside publication of our results in scientific journals, we will publish on the VOODOO website key message summaries to distil the main findings into easy to understand language for a range of audiences. Got to the library page and using the drop down menu select 'Deliverables' to view these one-page summaries.
22 November 2023
After the COVID19 imposed delays, the VOODOO project is pleased to report the data is in on how land-use driven variation in flower resources shapes the level of contact between managed and wild pollinator species foraging on shared flowers and the occurrence and loads of viruses among multiple pollinator species. Anaylses are proceeding and will continue over the next year, you can find the published papers and key message summaries at our library page.
24 June 2021
VOODOO and UFZ researchers, Christophe Dominik, Liu Yicong and Jonna Heuschele, talk about our project and interactions between viruses, plants and pollinators. Check out this short video (in German) : https://mdr.de/insektensommer
14 April 2021
VOODOO has produced its first scientific output. On the 14 April 2021 we published a new review titled 'Pathways for Novel Epidemiology: Plant–Pollinator–Pathogen Networks and Global Change' in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution (TREE).
This article describes how plant-pollinator network structure and species traits are thought to shape pathogen dynamics in the pollinator community and how global change may modulate species interactions, host susceptibility, and pathogen vir...
30 December 2020
The VOODOO kick-off meeting has been initially planned for the end of January 2020. Unfortunately, due to the vast emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the first project meeting had to be postponed.
Nonetheless, project team members, coordinators and partners had the opportunity to meet and discuss the first steps of VOODOO. The official kick-off meeting took place on 15 December 2020 in an online environment.
In such a way, all the participants were able to learn about e...
18 June 2020
The COVID-19 global pandemic is affecting many business sectors as well as people's everyday life. Due to the limited opportunities and restricted access to laboratories and equipment for fieldwork, the VOODOO partners have been forced to postpone a number of their project-related tasks.
Although the Swiss team managed to complete their planned fieldwork in 2020, some of the other partners were limited to executing only preliminary field sampling and protocol tests in the latter part of the s...
20 January 2020
The new 2019 BiodivERsA funded project VOODOO is going to kick-off on 27 and 28 January 2020. An international team of experts from four different countries has gathered in its common goal to address the knowledge gap in the existing data for pollinators and their benefits to humankind. The project shall forward the issue by discovering how land-use (conventional intensive agriculture, rural mosaic or urban land) and alien plant species drive modifications to the availability and quality of flor...