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It has been suggested that the widespread use of neonicotinoid insecticides threatens bees, but research on this topic has been surrounded by controversy. In order to synthesize which research approaches have been used to examine the effect of neonicotinoids on bees and to identify knowledge gaps, we systematically reviewed research on this subject that was available on the Web of Science and PubM
Agriculture's reliance on ecosystem services creates economic and ecological interdependencies between crop production and biodiversity. Interactions with mobile organisms are particularly complex because they depend on the spatial configuration of habitat at large scales. As such conserving habitat is likely to benefit multiple farmers whereas conservation costs are born individually, creating po
Research relating to ecosystem services has increased, partly because of drastic declines in biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. However, the mechanistic linkages between land use, biodiversity and service provision are poorly understood and synthesized. This is particularly true for many ecosystem services provided by mobile organisms such as natural enemies to crop pests. These species are
Bumblebee communities and their foraging resources were surveyed in south Swedish agricultural landscapes of contrasting complexity, defined by the size of arable fields and the amount of permanent grazed pastures. After the flowering of oilseed rape (OSR), simplified landscapes contained substantially less herbaceous flower resources and a lower proportion of perennials, compared to complex ones.
Insect pollination, despite its potential to contribute substantially to crop production, is not an integrated part of agronomic planning. A major reason for this are knowledge gaps in the contribution of pollinators to yield, which partly result from difficulties in determining area-based estimates of yield effects from insect pollination under field conditions. We have experimentally manipulated
The species richness of flower-visiting insects has declined in past decades, raising concerns that the ecosystem service they provide by pollinating crops and wild plants is threatened. The relative commonness of different species with shared ecological traits can play a pervasive role in determining ecosystem functioning, but information on changes in abundances of pollinators over time is lacki
Agricultural intensification is recognised as a major driver of biodiversity loss in human-modified landscapes. Several agro-environmental measures at different spatial scales have been suggested to mitigate the negative impact of intensification on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The effect of these measures on the functional structure of service-providing communities remains, however, large
Resilience of ecological communities to perturbation is important in the face of increased global change from anthropogenic stressors. Monitoring is required to detect the impact of, and recovery from, perturbations, and before-after-control-impact (BACI) analysis provides a powerful framework in this regard. However, species in a community are not observed with perfect detection, and occupancy an
While addition of managed honeybees (Apis mellifera) improves pollination of many entomophilous crops, it is unknown if it simultaneously suppresses the densities of wild insects through competition. To investigate this, we added 624 honeybee hives to 23 fields of oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.) over 2 years and made sure that the areas around 21 other fields were free from honeybee hives. We dem
Changes in forestry practices and on-going climate change may both have large impacts on forest bird populations. However, large-scale analyses of the effects of temporal changes in forest structure on forest bird numbers are largely lacking. We compared temporal trends from two Swedish nationwide long-term monitoring schemes, the Swedish Bird Survey (1998–2015) and the Swedish National Forestry I
As blooms of cyanobacteria expand and intensify in freshwater systems globally, there is increasing interest in their ecological effects. In addition to being public health hazards, cyanobacteria have long been considered a poor quality food for key zooplankton grazers that link phytoplankton to higher trophic levels. While past laboratory studies have found negative effects of nutritional constra
In saline soils, the severity of drought for the soil microbial community is exacerbated by accumulating concentrations of salts during drying. In this study we investigated how bacterial growth and respiration responses to drying-rewetting were affected by salinity. To do this, we adjusted a non-saline soil to four different salinities (0, 2, 7 and 22 mg NaCl g−1), followed by addition of plant m
Measures of functional diversity are expected to predict community responses to land use and environmental change because, in contrast to taxonomic diversity, it is based on species traits rather than their identity. Here, we investigated the impact of landscape homogenisation on plants, butterflies and birds in terms of the proportion of arable field cover in southern Finland at local (0.25 km2)
Extreme climatic events, such as heat waves, are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity during the next hundred years, which may accelerate shifts in hydrological regimes and submerged macrophyte composition in freshwater ecosystems. Since macrophytes are profound components of aquatic systems, predicting their response to extreme climatic events is crucial for implementation of climate
Modeling pollination ecosystem services requires a spatially explicit, process-based approach because they depend on both the behavioral responses of pollinators to the amount and spatial arrangement of habitat and on the within- and between-season dynamics of pollinator populations in response to land use. We describe a novel pollinator model predicting flower visitation rates by wild central-pla
Along with the global decline of species richness goes a loss of ecological traits. Associated biotic homogenization of animal communities and narrowing of trait diversity threaten ecosystem functioning and human well-being. High management intensity is regarded as an important ecological filter, eliminating species that lack suitable adaptations. Below-ground arthropods are assumed to be less sen
Understanding the effects of different agricultural practices on the mycorrhizal symbiosis is important for agricultural production and the sustainable use of soil. We investigated the composition and diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in soils from fields under different agricultural practices (conventional and organic cereal fields, leys and permanent pastures) in southern Sweden. T
Predatory arthropods contribute to biological control, but to become an integral part of agricultural management, it is essential to identify drivers of their spatio-temporal distribution at the landscape scale. This study focuses on how agricultural land use affects the community composition, emergence and dispersal tendency of predatory arthropods. The arthropods were collected in emergence trap
Mass-flowering crops lead to spatial redistributions of pollinators and to transient shortages within nearby semi-natural grasslands, but the impacts on plant-pollinator interactions remain largely unexplored. Here, we characterised which pollinator species are attracted by oilseed rape and how this affected the structure of plant-pollinator networks in nearby grasslands. We surveyed 177 networks
Air-starved combustion of biomass and fossil fuels releases aerosols, including airborne carbonaceous particles, causing negative climatic and health effects. Radiocarbon analysis of the elemental carbon (EC) fraction can help apportion sources of its emission, which is greatly constrained by the challenges in isolation of EC from organic compounds in atmospheric aerosols. The isolation of EC usin
