Managing agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and ecosystem services is a key aim of a sustainable agriculture. However, how the spatial arrangement of crop fields and other habitats in landscapes impacts arthropods and their functions is poorly known. Synthesising data from 49 studies (1515 landscapes) across Europe, we examined effects of landscape composition (% habitats) and configuration (edge density) on arthropods in fields and their margins, pest control, pollination and yields. Configuration effects interacted with the proportions of crop and non-crop habitats, and species' dietary, dispersal and overwintering traits led to contrasting responses to landscape variables. Overall, however, in landscapes with high edge density, 70% of pollinator and 44% of natural enemy species reached highest abundances and pollination and pest control improved 1.7-and 1.4-fold respectively. Arable-dominated landscapes with high edge densities achieved high yields. This suggests that enhancing edge density in European agroecosystems can promote functional biodiversity and yield-enhancing ecosystem services.
Floral plantings are promoted to foster ecological intensification of agriculture through provisioning of ecosystem services. However, a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of different floral plantings, their characteristics and consequences for crop yield is lacking. Here we quantified the impacts of flower strips and hedgerows on pest control (18 studies) and pollination services (17 studies) in adjacent crops in North America, Europe and New Zealand. Flower strips, but not hedgerows, enhanced pest control services in adjacent fields by 16% on average. However, effects on crop pollination and yield were more variable. Our synthesis identifies several important drivers of variability in effectiveness of plantings: pollination services declined exponentially with distance from plantings, and perennial and older flower strips with higher flowering plant diversity enhanced pollination more effectively. These findings provide promising pathways to optimise floral plantings to more effectively contribute to ecosystem service delivery and ecological intensification of agriculture in the future.
1.Enhancing key floral resources is essential to effectively mitigate the loss of pollinator diversity and associated provisioning of pollination functions in agro-ecosystems. However, effective floral provisioning measures may diverge among different pollinator conservation targets, such as the conservation of rare species or the promotion of economically important crop pollinators. We examined to what extent such diverging conservation goals could be reconciled. 2. We analysed plant-bee visitation networks of 64 herbaceous semi-natural habitats representing a gradient of plant species richness to identify key resource plants of the three distinct conservation target groups: rare bees (of conservation concern), dominant wild croppollinating bees and managed crop-pollinating bees (i.e. honeybees). 3. Considering overall flower visitation, rare bees tended to visit nested subsets of plant species that were also visited by crop pollinators (46% and 77% nestedness in the dissimilarity between rare bees and wild crop pollinators or managed honeybees respectively). However, the set of preferred plant species, henceforth 'key plant species' (i.e. those species disproportionately more visited than expected according to their floral abundance) was considerably more distinct and less nested among bee target groups. 4. Flower visits of all bee target groups increased with plant species richness at a similar rate. Importantly, our analyses revealed that an exponential increase in the flower abundance of the identified key plant species and complementarity in the bee visitation pattern across plant species ─ rather than total flower abundance ─ were the major drivers of these relationships. 5. Synthesis and applications. We conclude that the multiple goals of preserving high bee diversity, conserving rare species and sustaining crop pollinators can be reconciled if key plant species of different target groups are simultaneously available. This availability is facilitated by a high floral resource complementarity in the plant community. The list of identified key resource plant species we provide here can help practitioners such as land managers and conservationists to better design and evaluate pollinator conservation and restoration measures according to their goals. Our findings highlight the importance of identifying and promoting such plant species for pollinator conservation in agricultural landscapes.
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