Journal ArticleDOI
Biodiversity declines due to abandonment and intensification of agricultural lands: patterns and mechanisms
Kei Uchida,Atushi Ushimaru +1 more
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In this paper, the authors compared plant richness and butterfly and orthopteran richness and diversity among three land use types in seminatural grasslands: abandoned, traditional, and intensified terraces.Abstract:
Declines in plants and herbivorous insects due to land use abandonment and intensification have been studied in agricultural areas worldwide. We tested four hypotheses, which were complementary rather than mutually exclusive, to understand the mechanisms driving biodiversity declines due to abandonment and intensification. These predict that biodiversity decline is caused by a decline in resource diversity, changes in disturbance regime, surrounding landscape conversion, and a decrease in biomass production. We compared plant richness and butterfly and orthopteran richness and diversity among three land use types in seminatural grasslands: abandoned, traditional, and intensified terraces. Then, we examined effects of changes in resource (plant) richness, frequency of disturbance (mowing), and surrounding landscapes on butterfly and orthopteran diversity to understand the mechanisms driving decline after land abandonment and intensification. Plant and herbivore richness and diversity were significantly lower in abandoned and intensified grasslands than in traditional grasslands. This trend was consistent throughout the seasons in both years of the study. Changes in mowing frequency and surrounding landscape explained plant richness declines as a consequence of land abandonment and intensification. Declines in herbivorous insects were explained by plant richness declines and changes in mowing frequency, but not by landscape changes. Plant and herbivore richness were maximized at an intermediate mowing frequency (approximately twice per year), which is typical practice on traditional terraces. This is the first report demonstrating that the intermediate disturbance hypothesis explained well the biodiversity declines in agricultural ecosystems. The richness and diversity responses of herbivore functional groups to plant richness, mowing frequency, and surrounding landscapes were generally inconsistent with predictions. We found significant trends in which butterfly and orthopteran species with low abundance in traditional terraces were lost in abandoned and/or intensive terraces. This may suggest that the number of individuals of most herbivorous species decreased randomly with respect to life-history traits following a decline in plant richness after changes in disturbance frequency. This study demonstrates that declines in herbivorous insects can be explained by multiple factors, and provides a unified explanation for biodiversity declines in both abandoned and intensified use of agricultural lands, which have often been studied separately.read more
Citations
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The more-individuals hypothesis revisited: the role of community abundance in species richness regulation and the productivity-diversity relationship.
TL;DR: A formal theory is proposed that encompasses the processes driving species richness and diversity dynamics, clarifying how the different factors affecting diversity dynamics can be disentangled.
Journal ArticleDOI
Land consolidation and rural revitalization in China: Mechanisms and paths
Yang Zhou,Yamei Li,Chenchen Xu +2 more
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors systematically reviewed the evolution history of land consolidation in China, and explored the current status, characteristics and potential impact of land consolidations as well as the driving mechanism for land consolidation promoting rural revitalization, and finally explained the feasible way to revitalize countryside by land consolidation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Farmland abandonment in Europe: an overview of drivers, consequences, and assessment of the sustainability implications
Eda Ustaoglu,Marcus Collier +1 more
Abstract: In the last decades, there have been large areas of agricultural land that were abandoned in Europe, producing significant social and environmental impacts. Land abandonment is a dynamic process, w...
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Current European policies are unlikely to jointly foster carbon sequestration and protect biodiversity
Sabina Burrascano,Milan Chytrý,Tobias Kuemmerle,Eleonora Giarrizzo,Sebastiaan Luyssaert,Sebastiaan Luyssaert,Francesco Maria Sabatini,Carlo Blasi +7 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a review of the main EU policies targeting forests and grasslands is presented, and a striking ambivalence between policies and funding schemes addressing grassland conservation on the one hand and those supporting afforestation on the other (e.g. rural development funds).
Journal ArticleDOI
Multi-taxa approach shows consistent shifts in arthropod functional traits along grassland land-use intensity gradient.
TL;DR: It is concluded that high land-use intensity acts as an environmental filter selecting for on average smaller, more mobile, and less specialized species across taxa.
References
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