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Natural enemies such as predatory arthropods and parasitoids have the potential to suppress pest species and provide the ecosystem service biological control. When predicting the potential of biological control in agriculture it is important to give evidence on how agricultural management influence the abundance and functions of the natural enemies. In this study we examined whether managements pr
The effects of combustion phase and fuel on smoke particle emissions from a wood stove operated with three different wood fuels and from a corn stove were investigated. A single-particle mass spectrometer (aerosol time of flight mass spectrometer (ATOFMS)) was used for time-and size-resolved chemical signatures and a scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS) was used for online mobility size distrib
Agricultural intensification has contributed substantially to the increase in food production, but has come at the expense of soil degradation and environmental problems. Management of soil based ecosystem services need to be considered in agricultural management since intensive management implies not only costs to the farmer but also to society. In this study we used data from four long-term (55
The landscape matrix is suggested to influence the effect of habitat fragmentation on species richness, but the generality of this prediction has not been tested. Here, we used data from 10 independent studies on butterfly species richness, where the matrix surrounding grassland patches was dominated by either forest or arable land to test if matrix land use influenced the response of species rich
Wild and managed bees are well documented as effective pollinators of global crops of economic importance. However, the contributions by pollinators other than bees have been little explored despite their potential to contribute to crop production and stability in the face of environmental change. Non-bee pollinators include flies, beetles, moths, butterflies, wasps, ants, birds, and bats, among o
Pollinator declines have raised concerns about the persistence of plant species that depend on insect pollination, in particular by bees, for their reproduction. The impact of pollinator declines remains unknown for species-rich plant communities found in temperate seminatural grasslands. We investigated effects of land-use intensity in the surrounding landscape on the distribution of plant traits
Protecting semi-natural grasslands may through spill-over benefit species richness and abundance of flower-visiting insects in linear habitats, such as uncultivated field boundaries, in agricultural landscapes. However, whether local diversity increases both with decreasing distance from potential source habitats and increasing landscape heterogeneity is poorly known due to a general lack of studi
Pollination is an essential process in the sexual reproduction of seed plants and a key ecosystem service to human welfare. Animal pollinators decline as a consequence of five major global change pressures: climate change, landscape alteration, agricultural intensification, non-native species, and spread of pathogens. These pressures, which differ in their biotic or abiotic nature and their spatio
Pollinator populations have suffered severe declines in many industrialised countries due to reduced floral and nesting resources, brought on by agricultural intensification. One potential method of mitigating these effects is creating flower strips. Most previous studies have shown higher pollinator abundances in flower strips, but none have been able to demonstrate increased pollinator abundance
Increasing landscape heterogeneity and organic farming practices are known to enhance species richness in agroecosystems. However, little is known about the consequences of these management options on other biodiversity components such as community composition, phylogenetic structure and functional diversity which may be more closely linked to ecosystem
Agricultural intensification has resulted in large-scale loss of bee pollinators, but while some species have been negatively affected others seem to endure changed conditions. It has been suggested that certain morphological, ecological and life-history traits make some species more vulnerable to landscape changes. Information on which traits make species vulnerable and why may aid conservation o
Having historically been abundant throughout Europe, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) has in recent decades suffered severe population declines in many urban and rural areas. The decline in rural environments is believed to be caused by agricultural intensification, which has resulted in landscape simplification. We used giving-up densities (GUDs) of house sparrows feeding in artificial food
Pollination is a key ecosystem service which most often has been studied in isolation although effects of pollination on seed set might depend on, and interact with, other services important for crop production. We tested three competing hypotheses on how insect pollination and pest control might jointly affect seed set: independent, compensatory or synergistic effects. For this, we performed a ca
Nanotechnology gives us materials with enhanced or completely new properties. At the same time, inhalation of manufactured nano-objects has been related to an array of adverse biological effects. We characterized particle emissions, which occurred during maintenance of common metal nanoparticle generators and contrasted the properties of the emitted particles with those originally produced by the
Crop diversification and maintenance of semi-natural habitats (grasslands and field boundaries) are suggested to enhance farmland biodiversity, but the relative importance of these factors remains poorly known. We evaluated how crop diversity and availability of semi-natural grasslands at a landscape-scale interacted with local farming management (three management types from low to high intensity:
Increasing landscape complexity can enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services in agroecosystems. However, policies based on conversion of arable land into semi-natural habitats to increase landscape complexity and ecosystem services can be difficult to implement. Although it appears to be a promising management option, nothing is known about the effect of increasing landscape diversity through c
Today's intensive farming practices are known to have affected farmland biodiversity negatively in many different ways. As far as birds are concerned, they are known to have suffered during both summer and winter. Relatively little is known about the effects on birds during migration. We studied the stopover ecology of the Eurasian golden plover Pluvialis apricaria, a species listed in EU Birds Di
Weeds constitute major constraints for farmers by reducing crop yield and quality. However, weeds are managed effectively using herbicides, but this may cause harmful effects on human health and the environment. In an experiment on weed seed predation, we tested the biological control potential of carabid beetles to combat weeds in the absence of herbicides. Seeds from three common weed species we
Understanding the relationships between trait diversity, species diversity and ecosystem functioning is essential for sustainable management. For functions comprising two trophic levels, trait matching between interacting partners should also drive functioning. However, the predictive ability of trait diversity and matching is unclear for most functions, particularly for crop pollination, where in
P>1. Environmental changes may not always result in rapid changes in species distributions, abundances or diversity. In order to estimate the effects of, for example, land-use changes caused by agri-environment schemes (AES) on biodiversity and ecosystem services, information on the time-lag between the application of the scheme and the responses of organisms is essential. 2. We examined the effec
