Conservation of Pollinators in Traditional Agricultural Landscapes – New Challenges in Transylvania (Romania) Posed by EU Accession and Recommendations for Future Research

Abstract

Farmland biodiversity is strongly declining in most of Western Europe, but still survives in traditional low intensity agricultural landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe. Accession to the EU however intensifies agriculture, which leads to the vanishing of traditional farming. Our aim was to describe the pollinator assemblages of the last remnants of these landscapes, thus set the baseline of sustainable farming for pollination, and to highlight potential measures of conservation. In these traditional farmlands in the Transylvanian Basin, Romania (EU accession in 2007), we studied the major pollinator groups—wild bees, hoverflies and butterflies. Landscape scale effects of semi-natural habitats, land cover diversity, the effects of heterogeneity and woody vegetation cover and on-site flower resources were tested on pollinator communities in traditionally managed arable fields and grasslands. Our results showed: (i) semi-natural habitats at the landscape scale have a positive effect on most pollinators, especially in the case of low heterogeneity of the direct vicinity of the studied sites; (ii) both arable fields and grasslands hold abundant flower resources, thus both land use types are important in sustaining pollinator communities; (iii) thus, pollinator conservation can rely even on arable fields under traditional management regime. This has an indirect message that the tiny flower margins around large intensive fields in west Europe can be insufficient conservation measures to restore pollinator communities at the landscape scale, as this is still far the baseline of necessary flower resources. This hypothesis needs further study, which includes more traditional landscapes providing baseline, and exploration of other factors behind the lower than baseline level biodiversity values of fields under agri-environmental schemes (AES).

Ecological intensification to mitigate impacts of conventional intensive land use on pollinators and pollination

“…; Kovács‐Hostyánszki et al . ). Although still largely present in many parts of the world (Altieri et al .…”

Berries, greens, and medicinal herbs—mapping and assessing wild plants as an ecosystem service in Transylvania (Romania)

“…South-East Transylvania is a part of Romania in which traditional land use is still very common, while steps towards a modernized agriculture are already taking place [16,51,57], GDP is rather low (52% of the EU mean in the study year [58]), unemployment rates are high. In rural Transylvania despite a decline in recent years, many interactions between people and nature are still strongly embedded in the culture and form part of everyday life [59].…”

An Effective Way to Map Land-Use Intensity with a High Spatial Resolution Based on Habitat Type and Environmental Data

“…Furthermore, studies that assess the effect of LUI on biodiversity assume that intensively used agricultural land, which surrounds semi-natural habitats, is entirely unsuitable for most species, based on the island biogeography theory. These studies measure LUI as the area of, or distance to, semi-natural habitats such as woody elements [19][20][21][22]; the percentage of permanent grassland [23]; the percentage of arable fields [24]; or broad habitat classes [25]. However, it is now acknowledged that intensively used agricultural land may not always be entirely unsuitable [26][27][28].…”