Effects of spatio-temporal resource availability on pollinators and pest-natural enemies in fragmented agricultural landscapes (FRAGMENT III)
Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Final Report Abstract
Insects in agricultural landscape provide important ecosystem services such as crop pollination and pest control. However, important food resources for insects such as flowers and alternative prey can be rare in modern agricultural landscapes. We investigated effects of food resource availability on insects by (I) identifying the resource use of key insect pollinators and aphid enemies over time, and by (II) studying relationships between the spatio-temporal distribution of resources on insect density, fitness and ecosystem service delivery. Two species of bees (Osmia bicornis, Bombus terrestris) and three species of aphid enemies (Chrysoperla carnea, Coccinella septempunctata, Harmonia axyridis) used pollen mostly from woody plants, and pollen use changed strongly from the early (April-May) to the late (June-July) season. Contrary to our expectation, detailed resource maps did not improve the predictability of bumblebee colony development, the pollination success of field bean, Osmia cornuta abundance or the occurrence of aphid enemies on field beans. Instead, bumblebees, pollination success, Osmia cornuta and aphid enemies were negatively affected by increasing distance to forest or increasing cover of arable land in the landscapes. Only wild bee communities and Osmia bicornis showed the expected positive effect of floral resource availability. This project revealed new information on the spatio-temporal distribution and use of floral resources by ecosystem-service providing insects. The limited ability of floral resource maps to predict insect abundance, fitness or ecosystem services, suggests that more factors than food availability alone affect these insects in agricultural landscapes.
Publications
- (2019) Seasonal shifts and complementary use of pollen sources by key pollinators and aphid enemies in European agricultural landscapes. Journal of Applied Ecology 56: 2431–2442
Bertrand C, Eckerter P, Ammann L, Entling MH, Gobet E, Herzog F, Mestre L, Tinner W & Albrecht M
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13483) - (2020) Insights into aphid prey consumption by ladybirds: Optimising field sampling methods and primer design for High Throughput Sequencing. PLOS ONE 15: e0235054
Ammann L, Moorhouse-Gann R, Bertrand C, Mestre L, Cuff J, Pérez Hidalgo N, Ellison A, Herzog F, Entling MH, Albrecht M & Symondson WOC
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235054) - (2020) Using temporally resolved floral resource maps to explain bumblebee colony performance in agricultural landscapes. Agronomy 10: 1993
Eckerter PW, Albus L, Natarajan S, Albrecht M, Ammann L, Gobet E, Herzog F, Tinner W & Entling MH
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy10121993)
