Abstract
Farmland biodiversity is strongly declining in most of Western Europe, but still survives in traditional low intensity agricultural landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe. Accession to the EU however intensifies agriculture, which leads to the vanishing of traditional farming. Our aim was to describe the pollinator assemblages of the last remnants of these landscapes, thus set the baseline of sustainable farming for pollination, and to highlight potential measures of conservation. In these traditional farmlands in the Transylvanian Basin, Romania (EU accession in 2007), we studied the major pollinator groups—wild bees, hoverflies and butterflies. Landscape scale effects of semi-natural habitats, land cover diversity, the effects of heterogeneity and woody vegetation cover and on-site flower resources were tested on pollinator communities in traditionally managed arable fields and grasslands. Our results showed: (i) semi-natural habitats at the landscape scale have a positive effect on most pollinators, especially in the case of low heterogeneity of the direct vicinity of the studied sites; (ii) both arable fields and grasslands hold abundant flower resources, thus both land use types are important in sustaining pollinator communities; (iii) thus, pollinator conservation can rely even on arable fields under traditional management regime. This has an indirect message that the tiny flower margins around large intensive fields in west Europe can be insufficient conservation measures to restore pollinator communities at the landscape scale, as this is still far the baseline of necessary flower resources. This hypothesis needs further study, which includes more traditional landscapes providing baseline, and exploration of other factors behind the lower than baseline level biodiversity values of fields under agri-environmental schemes (AES).
Highlights
Wild pollinator populations are one of the major victims of intensive agricultural management, which diminishes available foraging resources, nesting and overwintering habitats [1]
Our results suggest that (i) both landscape scale effects and local foraging resources have a considerable effect on pollinator insects, which could suffer from both land use and land management change in the studied traditional Transylvanian agricultural systems; (ii) both arable fields and grasslands are important to sustain pollinator communities with different manner in the case of the different pollinator groups; (iii) the currently non-protected areas can be important conservation areas for the studied pollinator insects; (iv) species richness and abundance of wild bee species of European scale conservation interest are not directly influenced by the studied landscape and local scale environmental variables, represent new habitat use records in some cases
Our study provides a baseline of how pollinator communities are organised under low-intensity traditional agriculture in Transylvania
Summary
Wild pollinator populations are one of the major victims of intensive agricultural management, which diminishes available foraging resources, nesting and overwintering habitats [1]. The Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) dedicates special attention to the thematic assessment of pollinators, pollination and food production, reviewing the diversity, status, and trends of pollinators and pollination systems and their role in human well-being and biodiversity maintenance [6,7]. For such a comprehensive assessment, availability of data is essential; yet, the most biodiverse regions are often less-known by science [8]. There is currently increasing attention on Central and Eastern European (CEE) biodiversity, which is still considerably richer than in Western and Northern Europe, and may represent important baselines for conservation targets for whole Europe [9,10,11,12,13]
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