Pollen: Essential for the Environment, Despite Allergies
What to Know About the Importance of Pollen
What Is the Purpose of Pollen?
When spring arrives, we welcome the warm weather, but for some of us, pollen season can range from annoying to downright disruptive. However, pollen is half of the reproductive equation of a plant, and it’s the material that needs to be moved from flower to flower for plants to make seeds. Since pollen must be distributed for trees, flowers, grasses, and food crops, successful pollination is crucial for robust and livable environments.
How Is Pollen Good for the Environment?
As the movable material in a plant’s reproductive process, it is essential that pollen gets where it needs to go. In part by reproducing regularly, plants condition and maintain the environment (both the land and the atmosphere) through foundational ecosystem services such as:
Air filtration and oxygen emission
Temperature moderation by intercepting sunlight and producing shade, as well as releasing moisture into the air
Facilitating the water cycle by absorbing and transpiring moisture from the ground into the air
Stabilizing soil
Providing wildlife habitat
Pollen’s spread throughout an area ensures these benefits are widespread.
How Pollen Is Transported and Dispersed
Movable pollen and movable seeds are nature’s way of spreading a species around an area, propagating and ensuring the continued existence of a plant. Ecosystems spread outwards, like forests and fields, and for pollen to reach other specimens, it has to be dispersed and spread in one of two ways: by pollinators or by the wind.
Pollinators – Bees, butterflies, moths, flies, and some birds and bats physically move pollen from flower to flower. The pollen particles get stuck to their bodies, then drop off as the pollinator crawls or hovers over the many other flowers that they visit for nectar.
Wind – Many plants, including grasses and certain trees, depend on the wind to transport their pollen between specimens, each of which has specialized receptors. These pollen particles are small, light, and drift through the air during a species’ pollination season.
Why Some People Have Pollen Allergies
For seasonal allergy sufferers, itchy eyes, sneezing, and coughing are a challenge to deal with year after year. Depending on the individual, allergies can flare up in spring, summer, or fall, when plant materials are active and in flux and irritants are circulating in the air.
While we usually associate allergy-inducing pollen with the colorful flowers of spring and early summer, the pollen particles of wild and decorative flowers are the ones that get caught on and transported by the bodies of pollinators. The culprit of seasonal allergies in people is actually the wind-borne pollen particle types that some plants spread by releasing them into the air. These plants include grass and ragweed, but trees in particular are the cause of most spring allergies because their mature sizes can produce a lot of pollen in a season to increase their chances of reproduction.
The exact period of pollen production is different for each species throughout the spring and summer seasons, and some overlap with each other. Tolerance to allergens varies from individual to individual and can be caused by an inherited disposition, over-exposure, or under-exposure to an irritant. Even people without allergies can have similar reactions to particularly high pollen counts.
Fortunately, pollen season is on a fairly predictable schedule each year, and it is tracked closely by various organizations. The pollen count is often included in local weather reports, and it can also be checked at pollen.com. Pollen reports usually have a rating on how high the count is, as well as the currently offending species.
The main allergenic trees include:
Tips to Reduce Allergy Symptoms During Peak Seasons
Since pollen is everywhere and vital to environmental health, it’s difficult to manage allergy symptoms during peak pollen season (especially if you love spending time in nature). Different types of medications can be administered in various ways, including pill form, nasal sprays, liquids, and even regular shots. Otherwise, the best strategy to reduce allergy symptoms is to try to avoid contact with pollen on high-count days. This might include:
Keeping windows closed
Using an air filter indoors
Changing clothes and washing them after being outdoors
Wearing a mask if you must go outdoors (one benefit of going through the recent pandemic is masks are abundant in most households)
Staying indoors as much as possible
While pollen season is inevitable, the weather from day to day is variable. Windy days in spring are the worst for pollen spread, and warm winters may mean long, productive springs with lots of plant growth and lots of pollen release. Wet, rainy days tend to have very low amounts of pollen in the air.
The Benefits of Pollen to Human Health
Despite the difficult irritations of pollen, it’s ultimately necessary for life as we know it. Without the pollen cycle, there would be no vegetation to produce oxygen, and the atmosphere would quickly become very toxic and very hot. Green spaces, both large and small, are important to:
Condition the environment with ecosystem services and make it livable
Produce food in vegetable gardens, fruit and nut orchards, and field crops
Support our physical health with healthy living conditions and space for recreation, both of which support our mental health and overall quality of life
How to Support the Pollinator Population
The reality of declining numbers of pollinator populations has been in the news regularly for years, and a main driver of this is habitat loss. Less green space, the replacement of native plant ecosystems, and inhospitable conditions (including the overuse of pesticides and extreme heat) are contributing to lower population numbers of bees and other insects, while warmer temperatures are making some plants (like grasses, weeds, and certain trees) more productive, resulting in higher windborne pollen counts despite the lower numbers of pollinators.
Homeowners can help support pollinator populations, as well as the sources of the pollen itself, by taking good care of the trees and other plants in our residential yards with thoughtful landscaping and regular maintenance.
To care for a mature tree, it must be planted as a sapling first! Browse Nashville Tree Conservation Corps’ tree sale if you’re planning to put more trees in the ground. You can also sign up for our newsletter for local tree information and care tips, and consider volunteering with us to get involved with NTCC’s community of canopy advocates!