Promoting wild bees in European agricultural landscapes. The role of floral resources in driving and mitigating wild bee decline
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Chapter 1 General introduction 7Chapter 2 Museum specimens reveal loss of pollen host plants as key factor driving wild bee decline in The Netherlands 17 Chapter 3 Does conservation on farmland contribute to halting the biodiversity decline?37 Chapter 4 Environmental factors driving the effectiveness of European agri-environmental measures in mitigating pollinator lossa meta-analysis 55 Chapter 5 Local and landscape-level floral resources explain effects of wildflower strips on wild bees across four European countries 101 Chapter 6Using a trait-based approach and an extensive database on historical bee species distributions, Chapter 2 examines the relative importance of a range of proposed factors responsible for wild bee decline and specifically tests whether bee decline is caused by loss of floral resources.Chapter 3 reviews what is known about the impact of conservation measures on farmland, and provides a theoretic framework for the ecological processes and mechanisms affecting the effectiveness of these measures in conserving farmland biodiversity.In Chapter 4 the validity of this framework is tested for bees, hoverflies and butterflies.Using a metaanalytic approach, this study examines what environmental factors affect the effectiveness of European agri-environment schemes in promoting pollinators in agricultural landscapes.Chapter 5 presents the results of a field experiment, carried out in four European countries, that evaluates the effectiveness of an agri-environmental measure specifically targeted at wild bees.More specifically, this experiment investigates whether variation in effects of wildflower strips across countries can be explained by the interplay of local and landscapewide floral resource availability, and tests whether the observed foraging responses are indicative of actual population increases or merely reflect spatiotemporal aggregation responses.Chapter 6 provides a more in-depth analysis of the potential population-level effects of these wildflower strips.In this experiment, artificial trap nests are used to measure reproductive responses of cavity-nesting bee species to implementation of wildflower strips.Finally, the general discussion in Chapter 7 integrates the findings reported in the different chapters in this thesis.The results are put in a wider context, their implications for conservation management in agricultural landscapes are discussed, and future directions for further research are suggested.
Author: Jeroen Scheper
Language: English
Topic: Plant and animal studies
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Life on land, Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
Funders: Wellcome Trust, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK Government, European Commission, Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Vetenskapsrådet, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council
OpenAlex ID: W1763762060