Multifunctional flower strips - does such a thing exist?
Nilsson, L., Klatt, B. and Smith, H. (2018). Multifunctional flower strips - does such a thing exist?. 5th European Congress of Conservation Biology. doi: 10.17011/conference/eccb2018/107538
Date
2018Copyright
© the Authors, 2018
Agricultural production is one of the key drivers of biodiversity loss in the world, and as a consequence of this some ecosystem services that are important for crop production are threatened. There is a plethora of different agri-environmental/conservation measures taken to counter the biodiversity losses in agricultural landscapes, some better supported by evidence than others. One of these measures is flower strips adjacent to crop fields. Flower strips have mainly been proposed to support pollinators and pollination of crops (Jönsson et al., 2015) but may also support natural enemies and natural biological control of pests (Tschumi et al., 2015). However, the role of flower strips for biodiversity per se remains controversial. It has been suggested that they mainly support the relatively common species providing ecosystem services, and not rarer species in need of conservation measures (Wood et al., 2016). Further, most studied flower strips target only one organism group or ecosystem service. We suggest that the seed mix in the flower strip is an important determiner for which species it attracts. In this study, annual flower strips with a flower mixture tailored to attract both pollinators and natural enemies were sown on 12 different farms in a high intensively farmed area in southern Sweden. Effects of the flower strips for different organism groups were measured at different spatial scales after flowering of oilseed rape, when agricultural landscapes are usually lacking nectar and pollen resources. We measured the presence and abundance of pollinators (wild bees and hover flies) and natural enemies in the flower strips. We also sampled natural enemies and aphids in the adjacent wheat field, at several different distances from the field edge. Colonies of bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) were placed at different distances from the flower strips and their fitness assessed. With these different methods, we aim to get a comprehensive picture of how an annual flower strip, tailored to attract both pollinators and natural enemies, affect both common and rare species in the different organism groups at a landscape scale. Preliminary results show that the fitness of the bumble bee colonies declined sharply with their distance to the flower strips, solely, but also in interaction with the size of the flower strips and the proportion of agricultural land. Further analyses will show how wild bees and hoverflies as well as natural enemies and pest control were affected by the presence of and distance to a flower strip. The results from this study will expand our knowledge about flower strips as a conservation measure. It will teach us more about the potential of flower strips tailored to benefit not only one organism group but several. We will also learn more about the potential of annual flower strips to benefit rare species.
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Open Science Centre, University of JyväskyläConference
ECCB2018: 5th European Congress of Conservation Biology. 12th - 15th of June 2018, Jyväskylä, Finland
Original source
https://peerageofscience.org/conference/eccb2018/107538/Metadata
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