The impact of agricultural intensification and land-use change on the European arable flora

Abstract

The impact of crop management and agricultural land use on the threat status of plants adapted to arable habitats was analysed using data from Red Lists of vascular plants assessed by national experts from 29 European countries. There was a positive relationship between national wheat yields and the numbers of rare, threatened or recently extinct arable plant species in each country. Variance in the relative proportions of species in different threat categories was significantly explained using a combination of fertilizer and herbicide use, with a greater percentage of the variance partitioned to fertilizers. Specialist species adapted to individual crops, such as flax, are among the most threatened. These species have declined across Europe in response to a reduction in the area grown for the crops on which they rely. The increased use of agro-chemicals, especially in central and northwestern Europe, has selected against a larger group of species adapted to habitats with intermediate fertility. There is an urgent need to implement successful conservation strategies to arrest the decline of this functionally distinct and increasingly threatened component of the European flora.

Europe’s other debt crisis caused by the long legacy of future extinctions

“…Even though human impacts on the environment greatly intensified following World War II (3,6,23,24), our results suggest that the current threat status of many species reflects a legacy of several decades, and for four taxa even as much as a century. Such extended time-lags have indeed been observed in habitat-scale studies on vascular plants (12,18) or cryptogams (25) for which historic indicators most markedly outperformed current indicators in explaining the proportion of threatened species in our countryscale study as well (Table 3).…”

Integrated weed management systems with herbicide-tolerant crops in the European Union: lessons learnt from home and abroad

“…[108] Increased crop yields have historically been coupled with a decline in botanical diversity. [109] This suggests that in some situations there may be a trade-off between the botanical biodiversity and crop yield. There is a continual challenge in maintaining effective weed control while sustaining beneficial weed species at economically acceptable levels.…”

“…[138] To increase farmland biodiversity at the level of farm ecosystems, they advocate sustaining the populations of weed species that support farmland biodiversity and are adapted to the cropped area of the field, as these beneficial weeds can be distinct from the flora found in non-cropped land, which typically represents a small percentage of the total area of the farm. [108][109][110]139,140] They also consider that providing plant resources only on non-cropped land is insufficient to reverse declining trends in farmland biodiversity.…”

The effect of farming method on the dynamics of communities from the alliance Radiolion linoidis (Rias Goday 1961) Pietach 1965 in Kałuszyn Upland agrocenoses

“…Modern agrotechnology and intensive application of chemicals in field production have led to the disappearance of many specialised species and whole communities [2][3][4][5]. Other factors that have promoted the impoverishment of flora in agrocenoses include abandoning marginal land, reduced diversity of cultivated fields, for example smaller percentages of fields under Secale cereale L. and Linum usitatissimum L., and ploughing under of stubble fields which are the main place where many short-lived ground species develop [6,7]. They also include communities with Radiolion linoidis included in the list of endangered segetal communities in Poland [8].…”