Relating Insect Movements to Farming Systems in Dynamic Landscapes

Abstract

During the last decade the conservation of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes has been greatly emphasized. Intensification of agricultural production and practices, as well as land abandonment, have been considered as major threats (Solbrig, 1991), by making drastic changes in landscape structure and composition. The agricultural landscape is a shifting mosaic of crops, pastures, fallow lands and woody areas. Landscape elements exhibit their own disturbance regime, which depends on the practices used by farmers and thus interact with insects at several spatio-temporal scales. Changes at regional and long-term scales are the most documented and the most predictive (Baker, 1989; Rackham, 1986; Odum and Turner, 1990; Meeus, 1995; Crumley and Marquardt, 1987). A recent trend in western Europe is a decrease of the area covered by non-cultivated elements such as hedgerows, woodlots, heathlands, within intensive agricultural landscapes (Agger and Brandt, 1988; Bunce and Hallam, 1993; Burel and Baudry, 1990; Morant et al., 1995). In the mean time large tracks of farmland are abandoned. Thus the contrast between different regions increases. The changes within rural landscapes result in an increase in fragmentation of many elements and affect insect populations by reducing available habitats or seasonal refuges for many species. At a finer scale, farmers make decisions on crop succession in their farming system and on management practices for field boundaries and non-productive areas; this creates a changing landscape mosaic. Changes in agricultural landscapes can only be predicted through the knowledge of how farmers will change the land use pattern under different circumstances. Two levels must be considered: 1) changes in the type of production (e.g. from dairy production to cereals) and 2) changes in the techniques of production (e.g. feeding dairy cows with hay or maize silage). If, at a broad regional scale, relationships between the type of farming systems and landscape can be established, it becomes very fuzzy at the landscape scale, relating to, the scales of individual and population dispersal. Deffontaines et al. (1995) provide examples of two farms, in the Pays d’Auge, where the most productive one has more grassland and less annual forage crops. In all cases, the within farm land use diversity is striking, it results from both physical and spatial constraints and the requirements of the system of production (e.g. winter/summer forage). Many factors, out of the agricultural sector, also affect land use and landscape patterns, as in multi-job farms (Laurent et al., 1994). Trajectories of households as well as changes within farm systems are barely related at the individual farm scale. The major consequence from a landscape ecological point of view is that landscape changes cannot be derived from current landscape patterns (Burel and Baudry, 1990). More specifically, abandonment or dereliction of grassland is a stochastic process at the landscape scale, although deterministic at the farm scale.