(Press-News.org) Agri-environment schemes aimed to promote biodiversity on farmland have positive effects on wild bees, hoverflies and butterflies. Effects on diversity and abundance were strongest when agri-environment schemes prescribed sowing wild-flowers, the more flowering species the better. Organic farms, set-aside land or fields receiving reduced amounts of fertilizer and pesticides generally hosted more wild pollinators than conventionally farmed land. Jeroen Scheper of Alterra Research Institute and colleagues demonstrated this by analysing the results of 71 studies that had looked at the effects of implementing agri-environment schemes in various European countries.
'There has been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of agri-environment schemes so the results were a bit of a surprise' said co-author David Kleijn. 'We don't know whether the results indicate that agri-environment schemes boost pollinator populations or that they temporarily attract pollinators from surrounding areas. Positive effects were restricted to very common species. However, recently there has been a lot of concern that the decline of pollinators might result in pollination limitation of insect-pollinated crops. Wild bees are excellent pollinators and common species do just the trick. All you have to do to enhance the wild pollinators of crops on farmland is increase flower abundance in field margins roadsides or crop edges.'
The examined agri-environment schemes seem less effective in enhancing endangered pollinator species. Endangered species were rarely observed during the field studies. 'Most of the studies used for the analyses were carried out in North-western Europe where farming is relatively intensive. In these areas endangered species are restricted to semi-natural habitats and nature reserves. Also, endangered bee species often specialize on flowers that cannot easily be established on farmland, such as heather or bilberry. The conservation of Red data book pollinators seems to require a separate conservation strategy'.
Rachael Winfree, a leading pollination scientist from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA comments 'This is an interesting, timely and comprehensive study that tests several ecological hypotheses to answer an important question: Where and how should we restore pollinators on agricultural lands? Given the global interest in pollinator declines, and the considerable government funding going into pollinator restorations in the USA and EU, this work will have important policy implications."
INFORMATION:
This study was funded and supported by the EU FP7 project STEP and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (BO-11-011.01-011).
Original source:
Scheper, J., Holzschuh, A., Kuussaari, M., Potts, S.G., Rundlöf, M., Smith, H.G. & Kleijn, D. (2013) Environmental factors driving the effectiveness of European agri-environmental measures in mitigating pollinator loss – a meta-analysis. Ecology Letters. doi: 10.1111/ele.12128
Additional Information:
In: Garibaldi L.A., Steffan-Dewenter I, Winfree R, Aizen M.A., Bommarco R., Cunningham S.A., Kremen C., Carvalheiro L.G., Harder L.D., Afik O., Bartomeus I., Benjamin F., Boreux V., Cariveau D., Chacoff N.P., Dudenhöffer J.H., Freitas B.M., Ghazoul J., Greenleaf S.,Hipólito J., Holzschuh A., Howlett B., Isaacs R., Javorek S.K., Kennedy C.M., Krewenka K., Krishnan S., Mandelik Y., Mayfield M.M., Motzke I., Munyuli T., Nault B.A., Otieno M., Petersen J., Pisanty G., Potts S.G., Rader R., Ricketts T.H., Rundlöf M., Seymour C.L., Schüepp C., Szentgyörgyi H., Taki H., Tscharntke T., Vergara C.H., Viana B.F., Wanger T.C., Westphal C., Williams N., Klein A.M. Wild pollinators enhance fruit set of crops regardless of honey-bee abundance. Science 339: 1608-1611. DOI: 10.1126/science.1230200
Pollinators easily enhanced by flowering agri-environment schemes
2013-06-10
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
The dance of the atoms
2013-06-10
Lone people standing in a ballroom don't tend to move a lot. It's only when they find a suitable dance partner that rapid motion sets in. Atoms on iron-oxide surfaces behave in a similar way: Only with the right molecular partner do they dance across the surface. Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have now filmed the atoms, proving that carbon monoxide is the partner responsible for the quick motion. Their movies show that the motion leads directly to clustering – an effect that can do great harm in catalysts. The findings have now been published in the journal ...
Cost-effective: Universal HIV testing in India
2013-06-10
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In India most people who are HIV positive don't know it, yet testing and treatment are relatively cheap and available. It would therefore meet international standards of cost-effectiveness — and save millions of lives for decades — to test every person in the billion-plus population every five years according to a new study published in the journal PLoS One.
The findings are based on a careful analysis of India's HIV epidemic using the Cost-Effectiveness of Preventing AIDS Complications (CEPAC) International model, a sophisticated ...
Substances from African medicinal plants could help stop tumor growth
2013-06-10
African medicinal plants contain chemicals that may be able to stop the spread of cancer cells. This is the conclusion of researchers following laboratory experiments conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The plant materials will now undergo further analysis in order to evaluate their therapeutic potential. "The active substances present in African medicinal plants may be capable of killing off tumor cells that are resistant to more than one drug. They thus represent an excellent starting point for the development of new therapeutic treatments for cancers ...
British butterfly desperate for warm weather this summer
2013-06-10
Butterflies are extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and new research has revealed that when summer weather turns bad the silver-spotted skipper battles for survival. The butterfly, which previously faced extinction from habitat loss, is recovering following conservation efforts but the recent cool wet summers in England have almost stalled its progress.
A 27 year study by researchers at the University of Exeter in collaboration with the University of York, the University of Liverpool, Sussex Wildlife Trust, the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the charity Butterfly ...
World's first large(wafer)-scale production of III-V semiconductor nanowire
2013-06-10
The research team demonstrated a novel method to epitaxially synthesize structurally and compositionally homogeneous and spatially uniform ternary InAsyP1-y nanowire on Si at wafer-scale using metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). The high quality of the nanowires is reflected in the remarkably narrow PL and X-ray peak width and extremely low ideality factor in the InAsyP1-y nanowire/Si diode.
A nanowire is a nanostructure with a diameter of the order of a nanometer (10-9 meters). Alternatively, nanowires can be defined as structures that have a thickness or ...
Suicide risk factors mapped
2013-06-10
A landmark study of the Swedish population has given a clearer picture of important risk factors for suicide.
The study, a collaboration between Lund University in Sweden and Stanford University, showed that the rate of suicide among men is almost three times that of women. Being young, single and having a low level of education were stronger risk factors for suicide among men, while mental illness was a stronger risk factor among women. Unemployment was the strongest social risk factor among women, whereas being single was the strongest among men.
Because the study ...
Catching individual molecules in a million with optical antennas inside nano-boxes
2013-06-10
A single cell in our body is composed of thousands of millions of different biomolecules that work together in an extremely well-coordinated way. Likewise, many biological and biochemical reactions occur only if molecules are present at very high concentrations. Understanding how all these molecules interact with each other is key to advancing our knowledge in molecular and cell biology. This knowledge is of central and fundamental importance in the quest for the detection of the earliest stages of many human diseases. As such, one of ultimate goals in Life Sciences and ...
Study reveals leakage of carbon from land to rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal regions
2013-06-10
When carbon is emitted by human activities into the atmosphere it is generally thought that about half remains in the atmosphere and the remainder is stored in the oceans and on land. New research suggests that human activity could be increasing the movement of carbon from land to rivers, estuaries and the coastal zone indicating that large quantities of anthropogenic carbon may be hidden in regions not previously considered.
The research, published in Nature Geoscience and led by researchers from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Exeter, Laboratoire ...
The secret life of knots
2013-06-10
Nanotechnologies require a detailed knowledge of the molecular state. For instance, it is useful to know when and how a generic polymer, a long chain of polymers (chain of beads), knots. The study of molecular entanglement is an important field of study as the presence of knots affects its physical properties, for instance the resistence to traction. Previous studies had mainly obtained "static" data on the knotting probability of such molecules. In other words, they focused on the likelihood that a polymer may knot. The novelty of the study carried out by Micheletti ...
Uni Basel researchers discover master regulator in cancer metastasis
2013-06-10
The predominant cause of death in cancer patients is metastasis, the formation of secondary tumors in other organs like the brain, liver, and lungs. Cancer cells detach from the original primary tumor and reach a single cell or group of cells in another organ. The cells of the body normally remain in place through adhering to an extracellular substance. However, cancer cells learn how to release themselves from these bonds and invade surrounding tissues, blood, and the lymphatic system.
The transformation of sedentary, specialized cells into wandering, invasive, and ...