Urban gardens and green spaces are increasingly recognised as important refuges for wild pollinators, with gardening choices significantly influencing pollinator welfare and population resilience.
Urban gardens represent a significant and widely distributed opportunity to improve pollinator welfare through habitat creation. Individual gardening choices — native plant selection, pesticide elimination, provision of nesting habitat and water — aggregate to meaningful effects on local pollinator populations. Solitary bees, which include many important native pollinators, are often overlooked in pollinator welfare conversations focused on honeybees. Providing nesting habitat, avoiding unnecessary soil disturbance, and maintaining bare earth patches supports the diverse community of native bees that sustain local pollination services and ecosystem function.