Grassland Restoration on Landfill Sites in the East Midlands,United Kingdom: An Evaluation of Floral Resources and Pollinating Insects

Abstract

Pollinators are declining in Europe due to intensification of agriculture, habitat loss and fragmentation. Restored landfill sites are a significant potential reserve of semi-natural habitat, so their conservation value for supporting populations of pollinating insects was here examined by assessing whether the plant and pollinator assemblages of restored landfill sites are comparable to reference sites of existing wildlife value. Floral characteristics of the vegetation and the species richness and abundance of flower-visiting insect assemblages were compared between nine pairs of restored landfill sites and reference sites in the East Midlands of the United Kingdom, using standardized methods over two field seasons. No differences were found between the restored landfill and reference sites in terms of species richness or abundance of plants in flower and both types of site had similar assemblages of pollinators. However, plant and insect assemblages differed across the season, with species richness and abundance being lower for the restored landfill sites in the spring and higher in the autumn compared to the reference sites. The results indicate that in this region, landfill sites are being restored to a state comparable to that of the reference sites with regards to their provision of floral resources and the associated insect pollinator assemblages. Since there are currently 2,200 working landfill sites in England and Wales, covering 28,000 ha, and closing at a rate of 100 per year, this is potentially a significant reserve of land that could be restored.

Diversity and abundance of solitary and primitively eusocial bees in an urban centre: a case study from Northampton (England)

“…Apart from urban gardens which pro-vide diverse resources, leftover wild patches and roadsides are equally important for conservation of solitary and primitively eusocial bees, and provide different resources to managed gardens. These findings add weight to the argument that anthropogenic habitats can support pollinator assemblages that are as diverse and abundant as sites of specific nature conservation value (Tarrant et al 2013) and contribute to the landscape-level conservation of pollinators in Britain.…”

Flowering phenology and nesting resources influence pollinator community composition in a fragmented ecosystem

“…Food availability (floral resources) has impacts on pollinator richness, abundance, and community composition (Potts et al 2003). In landscapes with high variation in temporal and spatial distribution of floral resources, species may benefit by tracking the availability of resources in different landscape components over time Mandelik et al 2012;Tarrant et al 2013). For example, increased abundance and diversity of small-bodied generalist bees in natural habitat fragments surrounded by urban development is hypothesized to be due to use of floral resources in residential gardens in the urban matrix (Hinners et al 2012, Wray et al 2014, but this has not been explicitly tested.…”

Vegetation cover and grasslands in the vicinity accelerate development of carabid beetle assemblages on restored landfill sites

“…Invertebrate community composition and diversity, including those of carabids, have been found to be positively related to local habitat quality (Weibull, Ostman, and Granqvist 2003) whilst on the landscape scale, carabid assemblages are influenced by the amount and spatial arrangement of habitat patches and the surrounding landscape composition, specifically obstructing linear features such as road density (de La Pena et al 2003;Aviron et al 2005), and natural and semi-natural areas in the landscape (Liu et al 2015). Although habitat quality and landscape pattern are known to explain the composition and diversity of other taxa in restored landfill sites (Rahman et al 2011(Rahman et al , 2012Tarrant et al 2013), few studies have considered both habitat and landscape factors simultaneously for carabid beetles, particularly on restored landfill sites.…”