Understanding the negative and positive effects of agricultural land use for the conservation of biodiversity, and its relation to ecosystem services, needs a landscape perspective. Agriculture can contribute to the conservation of high-diversity systems, which may provide important ecosystem services such as pollination and biological control via complementarity and sampling effects. Land-use management is often focused on few species and local processes, but in dynamic, agricultural landscapes, only a diversity of insurance species may guarantee resilience (the capacity to reorganize after disturbance). Interacting species experience their surrounding landscape at different spatial scales, which influences trophic interactions. Structurally complex landscapes enhance local diversity in agroecosystems, which may compensate for local high-intensity management. Organisms with high-dispersal abilities appear to drive these biodiversity patterns and ecosystem services, because of their recolonization ability and larger resources experienced. Agri-environment schemes (incentives for farmers to benefit the environment) need to broaden their perspective and to take the different responses to schemes in simple (high impact) and complex (low impact) agricultural landscapes into account. In simple landscapes, local allocation of habitat is more important than in complex landscapes, which are in total at risk. However, little knowledge of the relative importance of local and landscape management for biodiversity and its relation to ecosystem services make reliable recommendations difficult.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00782.x

Landscape perspectives on agricultural intensification and biodiversity – ecosystem service management

Bees are subject to numerous pressures in the modern world. The abundance and diversity of flowers has declined, bees are chronically exposed to cocktails of agrochemicals, and they are simultaneously exposed to novel parasites accidentally spread by humans. Climate change is likely to exacerbate these problems in the future. Stressors do not act in isolation; for example pesticide exposure can impair both detoxification mechanisms and immune responses, rendering bees more susceptible to parasites. It seems certain that chronic exposure to multiple, interacting stressors is driving honey bee colony losses and declines of wild pollinators, but such interactions are not addressed by current regulatory procedures and studying these interactions experimentally poses a major challenge. In the meantime, taking steps to reduce stress on bees would seem prudent; incorporating flower-rich habitat into farmland, reducing pesticide use through adopting more sustainable farming methods, and enforcing effective quarantine measures on bee movements are all practical measures that should be adopted. Effective monitoring of wild pollinator populations is urgently needed to inform management strategies into the future.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2015/02/25/science.1255957.full.pdf

Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers

Many ecosystem services are delivered by organisms that depend on habitats that are segregated spatially or temporally from the location where services are provided. Management of mobile organisms contributing to ecosystem services requires consideration not only of the local scale where services are delivered, but also the distribution of resources at the landscape scale, and the foraging ranges and dispersal movements of the mobile agents. We develop a conceptual model for exploring how one such mobile-agent-based ecosystem service (MABES), pollination, is affected by land-use change, and then generalize the model to other MABES. The model includes interactions and feedbacks among policies affecting land use, market forces and the biology of the organisms involved. Animal-mediated pollination contributes to the production of goods of value to humans such as crops; it also bolsters reproduction of wild plants on which other services or service-providing organisms depend. About onethird of crop production depends on animal pollinators, while 60–90% of plant species require an animal pollinator. The sensitivity of mobile organisms to ecological factors that operate across spatial scales makes the services provided by a given community of mobile agents highly contextual. Services vary, depending on the spatial and temporal distribution of resources surrounding the site, and on biotic interactions occurring locally, such as competition among pollinators for resources, and among plants for pollinators. The value of the resulting goods or services may feed back via market-based forces to influence land-use policies, which in turn influence land management practices that alter local habitat conditions and landscape structure. Developing conceptual

/pdf/pollination-and-other-ecosystem-services-produced-by-mobile-3kqcn3843o.pdf

Pollination and other ecosystem services produced by mobile organisms: a conceptual framework for the effects of land-use change.

Declines in bumble bee species in the past 60 years are well documented in Europe, where they are driven primarily by habitat loss and declines in floral abundance and diversity resulting from agricultural intensification. Impacts of habitat degradation and fragmentation are likely to be compounded by the social nature of bumble bees and their largely monogamous breeding system, which renders their effective population size low. Hence, populations are susceptible to stochastic extinction events and inbreeding. In North America, catastrophic declines of some bumble bee species since the 1990s are probably attributable to the accidental introduction of a nonnative parasite from Europe, a result of global trade in domesticated bumble bee colonies used for pollination of greenhouse crops. Given the importance of bumble bees as pollinators of crops and wildflowers, steps must be taken to prevent further declines. Suggested measures include tight regulation of commercial bumble bee use and targeted use of environmentally comparable schemes to enhance floristic diversity in agricultural landscapes.

/pdf/decline-and-conservation-of-bumble-bees-1thgzzqlml.pdf

Decline and conservation of bumble bees

Over half of the European landscape is under agricultural management and has been for millennia. Many species and ecosystems of conservation concern in Europe depend on agricultural management and are showing ongoing declines. Agri-environment schemes (AES) are designed partly to address this. They are a major source of nature conservation funding within the European Union (EU) and the highest conservation expenditure in Europe. We reviewed the structure of current AES across Europe. Since a 2003 review questioned the overall effectiveness of AES for biodiversity, there has been a plethora of case studies and meta-analyses examining their effectiveness. Most syntheses demonstrate general increases in farmland biodiversity in response to AES, with the size of the effect depending on the structure and management of the surrounding landscape. This is important in the light of successive EU enlargement and ongoing reforms of AES. We examined the change in effect size over time by merging the data sets of 3 recent meta-analyses and found that schemes implemented after revision of the EU's agri-environmental programs in 2007 were not more effective than schemes implemented before revision. Furthermore, schemes aimed at areas out of production (such as field margins and hedgerows) are more effective at enhancing species richness than those aimed at productive areas (such as arable crops or grasslands). Outstanding research questions include whether AES enhance ecosystem services, whether they are more effective in agriculturally marginal areas than in intensively farmed areas, whether they are more or less cost-effective for farmland biodiversity than protected areas, and how much their effectiveness is influenced by farmer training and advice? The general lesson from the European experience is that AES can be effective for conserving wildlife on farmland, but they are expensive and need to be carefully designed and targeted.

/pdf/the-role-of-agri-environment-schemes-in-conservation-and-3ngj15rjs9.pdf

The role of agri-environment schemes in conservation and environmental management

Providing foraging resources for bumblebees in intensively farmed landscapes

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Providing foraging resources for bumblebees in intensively farmed landscapes