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In agricultural landscapes, sown flower strips can benefit pollinators and pollination of nearby plants, but their impact on pollination in the wider landscape is poorly studied. We evaluated effects on reproductive success of field bean (Vicia faba) and woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca) using data from two study systems, both including study sites (1 km radius) with (flower strip sites) or wit
To promote a more sustainable agricultural production, the European Commission implemented direct payments that require farmers to implement greening measures aimed at reducing negative effects of agriculture on the environment and biodiversity. These greening measures (including fallows and permanent grasslands) have been criticised for their potential inability to conserve biodiversity and promo
Many studies have investigated effects of organic farming on the abundance and diversity of farmland birds, but few have considered how these effects vary between seasons. We analysed the effects of organic farming during an entire year in a previously understudied region, Galicia (North-West Spain), a relatively heterogeneous landscape which is an important wintering and breeding ground for birds
Loss and fragmentation of semi-natural grasslands have had negative consequences for grassland biodiversity, such as butterflies. Urban parks and other urban green spaces have so far largely been overlooked as suitable butterfly habitats, although they could potentially sustain diverse butterfly populations over time. We analysed the temporal change in butterfly species assemblages in urban green
Neonicotinoids are implicated in bee declines and laboratory studies imply that they impair the bee immune system, thereby precipitating a rise in pathogen levels. To establish whether such synergisms reduce bee performance in real-world agricultural landscapes, we analysed the microbial composition of the bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) samples from our recent landscape study on the impacts of fiel
Enhancing floral resources is a widely accepted strategy for supporting wild bees and promoting crop pollination. Planning effective enhancements can be informed with pollination service models, but these models should capture the behavioural and spatial dynamics of service-providing organisms. Model predictions, and hence management recommendations, are likely to be sensitive to these dynamics. W
Interactions between multiple stressors have been implicated in elevated honeybee colony losses. Here, we extend our landscape-scale study on the effects of placement at clothianidin seed-treated oilseed rape fields on honeybees with an additional year and new data on honeybee colony development, swarming, mortality, pathogens and immune gene expression. Clothianidin residues in pollen, nectar and
Extensively managed grasslands are recognized globally for their high biodiversity and their social and cultural values. However, their capacity to deliver multiple ecosystem services (ES) as parts of agricultural systems is surprisingly understudied compared to other production systems. We undertook a comprehensive overview of ES provided by natural and semi-natural grasslands, using southern Afr
Stakeholder interaction is important for enabling environmental research to support the societal transition to sustainability. We argue that it is crucial to take researchers’ approaches to and perceptions of stakeholder interaction into account, to enable more clarity in discussions about interaction, as well as more systematic interaction approaches. Through a survey and focus group interviews w
How insects promote crop pollination remains poorly understood in terms of the contribution of functional trait differences between species. We used meta-analyses to test for correlations between community abundance, species richness and functional trait metrics with oilseed rape yield, a globally important crop. While overall abundance is consistently important in predicting yield, functional div
Aims: Climate change is known to drive both the reshuffling of whole assemblages and range shifts of individual species. Less is known about how local colonizations and extinctions of individual species contribute to changes at the community level. Our aim was to estimate the contribution of individual species to a change in community composition attributed to climate change and to relate these sp
Lake restoration practices based on reducing fish predation and promoting the dominance of large-bodied Daphnia grazers (i.e., biomanipulation) have been the focus of much debate due to inconsistent success in suppressing harmful cyanobacterial blooms. While most studies have explored effects of large-bodied Daphnia on cyanobacterial growth at the community level and/or on few dominant species, pr
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
Making decisions between alternatives are challenging when there is weak or unreliable knowledge about the risks and benefits of the alternatives. This requires a trade-off between risks (and benefits). Here, we comment on a recent paper on risk–risk trade-offs and highlight the difficulties of making such trade-offs when the available evidence is of different strength. One current example of a ri
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
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
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
Pollen analysis is an important tool in many fields, including pollination ecology, paleoclimatology, paleoecology, honey quality control, and even medicine and forensics. However, labour‐intensive manual pollen analysis often constrains the number of samples processed or the number of pollen analysed per sample. Thus, there is a desire to develop reliable, high‐throughput, automated systems. We p
While an increasing number of studies indicate that the range, diversity and abundance of many wild pollinators has declined, the global area of pollinator-dependent crops has significantly increased over the last few decades. Crop pollination studies to date have mainly focused on either identifying different guilds pollinating various crops, or on factors driving spatial changes and turnover obs
