As urbanization continues throughout much of the world, there is great interest in better understanding the value of urban and residential environments to pollinators. We explored how landscape context affects the abundance and diversity of bees on 50 residential properties in northern Georgia, USA, primarily in and around Athens, GA. Over 2 years of pan trap sampling we...
Savannahs are often branded by livestock grazing with resulting land degradation. Holistic management of livestock was proposed to contribute to biodiversity conservation by simulating native wildlife grazing behaviour. This study attempts the comparison of the impact of a holistic management regime to a wildlife grazing management regime on grass and ground-dwelling beetle...
Insect groups are declining worldwide; Lepidoptera are among the taxa most affected in terrestrial ecosystems. The main drivers of these declines are a diverse set of factors relating to environmental change including habitat loss, pollution, and climate change. In 2019 and 2020, we surveyed 118 and 90 islands, respectively, in southern Finland’s archipelago for occupancy of...
Invasive alien species could generate a multitude of impacts towards native species. The introduction and spread of Vespa velutina in Europe is raising concern for the conservation of insect’s biodiversity, including wasps due to predation, competition or a combination of these two mechanisms. Nevertheless, most evidence for negative effects on other wasps are based on laboratory...
We estimated the potential impact of Global Warming on the species richness of Iberian butterflies. First, we determined the grid size that maximized the balance between geographic resolution, area coverage and environmental representativeness. Contemporary richness was modelled in several alternative ways that differed in how sampling effort was controlled for, and in whether...
Global declines in pollinator populations are an ongoing concern from biodiversity and food security viewpoints. A growing conservation initiative in agricultural landscapes is the establishment of wildflowers on marginal lands to provide floral resources and habitat for pollinators. However, the effectiveness of such conservation and restoration efforts are not always assessed...
The two sibling and syntopic odonate species Sympetrum striolatum and Sympetrum vulgatum are common and widespread in Central Europe. While S. striolatum has strong positive population trends, declines of S. vulgatum are observed. The aim of this study was to identify possible drivers of these diverging trends. We presumed that differences in egg development may lead to...
Biomass is an important metric for monitoring carabid populations and serves as an ecological indicator. Models that predict carabid weight based on body size represent a simple and straightforward method to estimate biomass and are therefore commonly used. However, such models are rarely evaluated against independent validation data. In this study, we evaluated the two widely...
This study addresses the use of conditioners as a driver of arthropod loss in agricultural landscapes. Conditioners compress the freshly cut mowing material mechanically to destroy the evaporation-inhibiting wax layer of the grass material. This compression potentially increases the physical damage to several arthropod groups during the mowing process. We have combined an...
Habitat loss and fragmentation are considered the foremost threats in pollinator decline, and in England and Wales, 97% of wildflower meadows were lost by 1984. The value of creating flower-rich margins in agricultural environments is established, yet there is growing potential to support pollinator populations in urban landscapes. We used citizen science to investigate the...
The loss of biodiversity and biomass of insects has a detrimental effect on eco-systems and associated ecosystem services, e.g. pollination. For this reason, various nature conservation measures for the promotion of insects are being created in agricultural landscapes. One of those measures is the so-called flower strip at the edge of fields. However, it is repeatedly propagated...
Noctuidae belong to one of the largest families of night-flying Lepidoptera. However, despite being among the most common nocturnal flower-visitors, they have seldom been included in pollination networks. Similarly, the current knowledge on food plants used by adults is rather scarce. In this article, we build the first moth–plant pollen transfer network in the Balearic...
In 2016, the annual value of all global crops dependent upon pollination was valued at $ 235–$ 577 billion (US$). Pollination service is threatened by habitat loss, pesticides, and climate change. We collected potential pollinators with blue vane traps in native grasslands, Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) lands, and cropland (land use), and their embedded playa wetlands (land...
In Hungary, the boreal-alpine mosquito Aedes punctor has a disjunct distribution limited to the Hungarian mid-mountains. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential effect of global warming on the future (2041–2060 and 2061–2080) climatic suitability for the mosquito in Hungary. The results indicate the heterogeneous, but in general, the negative effect of climate...
Agricultural intensification results in biodiversity loss through land conversion and management practices which negatively impact arthropods. The abundance and diversity of ground-dwelling predators, e.g. ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) and spiders (Araneae), are negatively affected by soil disturbances such as tillage. Reducing soil disturbances can potentially conserve...
Rural landscapes in Europe have suffered considerable land-use change in the last 50 years, with agricultural intensification in western regions and land abandonment in eastern and southern regions. The negative impacts of agricultural intensification on butterflies and other insects in western Europe have been well studied. However, less is known about the impacts of abandonment...
Climate change affects butterflies in many ways, influencing the timing of emergence and reproduction, habitat preferences, and behaviour. The small blue (Cupido minimus Fuessley, 1775) is highly specialised in its host plant requirements, feeding on the seeds of a single species, kidney vetch (Anthyllis vulneraria), on which the larvae occur singly to avoid cannibalism. The...
Agricultural intensification and the concomitant landscape homogenization is leading to a worldwide decline in farmland biodiversity. Non-crop habitats in agroecosystems may counteract the loss of arthropods such as spiders and thus contribute to sustainable agriculture. However, the effectiveness of field margins and set-aside wildflower-sown patches in maintaining spider...
Concerns over the increasing cost and environmental impact of high inorganic nitrogen (N) inputs have led to a reappraisal of the role of legumes, particularly clover, in maintaining soil fertility in improved grasslands. Clover and other legumes host the symbiotic root bacteria Rhizobium that fix N, reducing the need for N fertiliser application. Grass plus clover swards are...
Pollinators are threatened worldwide and strategies and measures to support their conservation are proliferating. Among them, the approach “Farming with Alternative Pollinators” (FAP) aims to support pollinators by seeding strips of pollinator-attracting cultivated plants surrounding the crops, and simultaneously providing income to the farmer. In this study we assessed whether...
Insects are reported to be in decline around the globe, but long-term datasets are rare. The causes of these trends are elusive, with changes in land use and climate among the top candidates. Yet if species traits can predict rates of population change, this can help identify underlying mechanisms. If climate change is important, for example, high-latitude species may decline as...
The Marsh Fritillary butterfly (Euphydryas aurinia) is a Eurasian species which has suffered significant reductions in occurrence and abundance over the past century, particularly across the western side of its range, due to agricultural intensification and habitat loss. This loss has been particularly severe in the UK with extensive localised extinctions. Following sympathetic...
Within the citizen science project “Flowering meadows for Saxonian butterflies”, more than 640 meadows are partially and at maximum three times annually mowed in order to change urban lawns into habitats for insects. In 2019, insect diversity was evaluated using the 100 sweep net technique during five visits at nine butterfly meadows (BM) and nine intensively mowed lawns (IML...