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Honeybees might outcompete wild bees by depleting common resources, possibly more so in simplified landscapes where flower-rich habitats have been lost. We tested this by experimentally adding honeybee hives to nine sites while ensuring that ten additional sites were free from hives. The landscape surrounding each geographically separated site either held low (homogeneous landscape) or high (heter
Plant-feeding insects reduce yields substantially in all major crops despite considerable crop protection efforts. A lack of long-term monitoring data and insufficient ecological knowledge of pest insects limit our possibilities to characterize drivers of change in their abundances. We demonstrate how a suite of complementary methods and data sources can be used to analyse historical shifts in pes
In saline soils, the severity of drought for the soil microbial community is exacerbated by accumulating concentrations of salts during drying. In this study we investigated how bacterial growth and respiration responses to drying-rewetting were affected by salinity. To do this, we adjusted a non-saline soil to four different salinities (0, 2, 7 and 22 mg NaCl g−1), followed by addition of plant m
Measures of functional diversity are expected to predict community responses to land use and environmental change because, in contrast to taxonomic diversity, it is based on species traits rather than their identity. Here, we investigated the impact of landscape homogenisation on plants, butterflies and birds in terms of the proportion of arable field cover in southern Finland at local (0.25 km2)
Uncultivated field boundaries constitute a significant part of the remaining semi-natural habitat in simplified agricultural landscapes, providing habitats for many grassland species. In Europe, agri-environment schemes (AES) offer incentives to farmers to manage farmland more environmentally friendly. In Sweden, one AES has specifically targeted management of incidental habitats on farmland by pr
Mass-flowering crops (MFCs) are increasingly cultivated and might influence pollinator communities in MFC fields and nearby semi-natural habitats (SNHs). Across six European regions and 2 years, we assessed how landscape-scale cover of MFCs affected pollinator densities in 408 MFC fields and adjacent SNHs. In MFC fields, densities of bumblebees, solitary bees, managed honeybees and hoverflies were
Crop diversification and maintenance of semi-natural habitats (grasslands and field boundaries) are suggested to enhance farmland biodiversity, but the relative importance of these factors remains poorly known. We evaluated how crop diversity and availability of semi-natural grasslands at a landscape-scale interacted with local farming management (three management types from low to high intensity:
Pollinator declines have raised concerns about the persistence of plant species that depend on insect pollination, in particular by bees, for their reproduction. The impact of pollinator declines remains unknown for species-rich plant communities found in temperate seminatural grasslands. We investigated effects of land-use intensity in the surrounding landscape on the distribution of plant traits
Pollination is an essential process in the sexual reproduction of seed plants and a key ecosystem service to human welfare. Animal pollinators decline as a consequence of five major global change pressures: climate change, landscape alteration, agricultural intensification, non-native species, and spread of pathogens. These pressures, which differ in their biotic or abiotic nature and their spatio
Biological control, an essential ecosystem service to agriculture, can be affected by ecological processes operating at landscape scales. Here we assessed the effect of landscape complexity, measured as proportion of arable land (PAL), on the abundance of aphids, parasitoids, and specialist and generalist predators. In addition we set up cage experiments to test the ability of these groups of enem
Soil salinization is a growing threat to global agriculture and carbon (C) sequestration, but to date it remains unclear how microbial processes will respond. We studied the acute response to salt exposure of a range of anabolic and catabolic microbial processes, including bacterial (leucine incorporation) and fungal (acetate incorporation into ergosterol) growth rates, respiration and gross N min
Protecting semi-natural grasslands may through spill-over benefit species richness and abundance of flower-visiting insects in linear habitats, such as uncultivated field boundaries, in agricultural landscapes. However, whether local diversity increases both with decreasing distance from potential source habitats and increasing landscape heterogeneity is poorly known due to a general lack of studi
Pollinator populations have suffered severe declines in many industrialised countries due to reduced floral and nesting resources, brought on by agricultural intensification. One potential method of mitigating these effects is creating flower strips. Most previous studies have shown higher pollinator abundances in flower strips, but none have been able to demonstrate increased pollinator abundance
Increasing landscape heterogeneity and organic farming practices are known to enhance species richness in agroecosystems. However, little is known about the consequences of these management options on other biodiversity components such as community composition, phylogenetic structure and functional diversity which may be more closely linked to ecosystem
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are known to alter the fitness of individual organisms via changes in growth, behavior, and reproduction. It is largely unknown, however, whether these effects cascade through the food web and indirectly affect other, less sensitive organisms. The authors present results from a mesocosm experiment whereby the effects of the synthetic estrogen 17α-ethinylestradiol (EE
Forest soils are generally considered to be net sinks of methane (CH4), but CH4 fluxes vary spatially depending on soil conditions. Measuring CH4 exchange with chambers, which are commonly used for this purpose, might not result in representative fluxes at site scale. Appropriate methods for upscaling CH4 fluxes from point measurements to site scale are therefore needed. At the boreal forest resea
To address the challenges of biodiversity conservation and commodity production, a framework has been proposed that distinguishes between the integration (land sharing) and separation (land sparing) of conservation and production. Controversy has arisen around this framework partly because many scholars have focused specifically on food production rather than more encompassing notions such as land
The study presents a method to evaluate the response of forest ecosystems to increased biomass extraction based on the integrated ecosystem model ForSAFE. It evaluates the effects of residue removal, intensification of thinnings and a shorter rotation period on a forest site in Southern Sweden. The evaluation includes multiple ecosystem indicators for productivity, carbon storage, wood production,
Pollination of insect pollinated crops has been found to be correlated to pollinator abundance and diversity. Since organic farming has the potential to mitigate negative effects of agricultural intensification on biodiversity, it may also benefit crop pollination, but direct evidence of this is scant. We evaluated the effect of organic farming on pollination of strawberry plants focusing on (1) i
The decline of one farmland bird, the migratory European starling, has been attributed to both agricultural intensification and farmland abandonment and to factors operating both during the winter and during the breeding season. We analysed population data from thirty-three Swedish nestbox colonies over more than two decades to determine if the national decline was caused by a common factor affect
