The effectiveness of flower strips and hedgerows on pest control,pollination services and crop yield: a quantitative synthesis

Floral plantings are promoted to foster ecological intensification of agriculture through provisioning of ecosystem services. However, a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of different floral plantings, their characteristics and consequences for crop yield is lacking. Here we quantified the impacts of flower strips and hedgerows on pest control (18 studies) and pollination services (17 studies) in adjacent crops in North America, Europe and New Zealand. Flower strips, but not hedgerows, enhanced pest control services in adjacent fields by 16% on average. However, effects on crop pollination and yield were more variable. Our synthesis identifies several important drivers of variability in effectiveness of plantings: pollination services declined exponentially with distance from plantings, and perennial and older flower strips with higher flowering plant diversity enhanced pollination more effectively. These findings provide promising pathways to optimise floral plantings to more effectively contribute to ecosystem service delivery and ecological intensification of agriculture in the future.     

Ecosystem services provided by armadillos

Awareness of the natural ecological processes provided by organisms that benefit human well‐being has significantly progressed towards the goal of making conservation a mainstream value. Identifying different services and the species that provide them is a vital first step for the management and maintenance of these so‐called ecosystem services. Herein, we specifically address the armadillos, which play key functional roles in terrestrial ecosystems, including as ecosystem engineers, predators, and vectors of invertebrates and nutrients, although these roles have often been overlooked. Armadillos can control pests, disperse seeds, and be effective sentinels of potential disease outbreaks or bioindicators of environmental contaminants. They also supply important material (meat, medicines) and non‐material (learning, inspiration) contributions all over the Americas. We identify key gaps in the understanding of ecosystem services provided by armadillos and areas for future research required to clarify their functional role in terrestrial ecosystems and the services they supply. Such information will produce powerful arguments for armadillo conservation.     

Wading through the swamp: what does tropical peatland restoration mean to national‐level stakeholders in Indonesia?

Ecological restoration is considered to play an important role in mitigating climate change, protecting biodiversity, and preventing environmental degradation. Yet, there are often multiple perspectives on what outcomes restoration should be aiming to achieve, and how we should get to that point. In this study we interview a range of policymakers, academics, and non‐governmental organization (NGO) representatives to explore the range of perspectives on the restoration of Indonesia's tropical peatlands—key global ecosystems that have undergone large‐scale degradation. Thematic analysis suggests that participants agreed about the importance of restoration, but had differing opinions on how effective restoration activities to date have been and what a restored peatland landscape should look like. These results exemplify how ecological restoration can mean different things to different people, but also highlight important areas of consensus for moving forward with peatland restoration strategies.     

Mild cycles open closed communities to ecological restoration

Species loss is a global issue. With up to a million species at risk and insufficient protected area to maintain the world's biodiversity, humanity will increasingly need to rely on species re‐introductions to locally restore diversity and function. However, such restoration attempts are bound to fail when ecological communities get locked in a closed state that is resistant to recovery. It is presently unknown how to repair these closed systems. We use mathematical models to identify ways out of this problem. We first show how ecological communities may enter a closed state, to then explain how to open them up again for restoration of their original diversity. We find that restoration is often still possible shortly after initial species loss, as (1) the secondary extinctions that produce closure have not happened yet and (2) mild population fluctuations still allow successful repair during a transient postdisturbance phase. However, after this typically short window of opportunity for restoration, the system enters a new equilibrium, which may be a closed state. Our analysis shows how to take ecological communities out of the closed state: Appropriate management of carrying capacities produces a regime of mild population fluctuations that opens a window for successful species re‐introductions. These windows can be perpetually recurring or permanently open. Such opportunities for repair can be absent under regimes of wild cycles or perfect stability. We conclude that mild cycles may open windows of opportunity for the repair of communities that have become resistant to recovery.     

Agriculture erases climate constraints on soil nematode communities across large spatial scales

Anthropogenic conversion of natural to agricultural land reduces aboveground biodiversity. Yet, the overall consequences of land‐use changes on belowground biodiversity at large scales remain insufficiently explored. Furthermore, the effects of conversion on different organism groups are usually determined at the taxonomic level, while an integrated investigation that includes functional and phylogenetic levels is rare and absent for belowground organisms. Here, we studied the Earth's most abundant metazoa—nematodes—to examine the effects of conversion from natural to agricultural habitats on soil biodiversity across a large spatial scale. To this aim, we investigated the diversity and composition of nematode communities at the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic level in 16 assemblage pairs (32 sites in total with 16 in each habitat type) in mainland China. While the overall alpha and beta diversity did not differ between natural and agricultural systems, all three alpha diversity facets decreased with latitude in natural habitats. Both alpha and beta diversity levels were driven by climatic differences in natural habitats, while none of the diversity levels changed in agricultural systems. This indicates that land conversion affects soil biodiversity in a geographically dependent manner and that agriculture could erase climatic constraints on soil biodiversity at such a scale. Additionally, the functional composition of nematode communities was more dissimilar in agricultural than in natural habitats, while the phylogenetic composition was more similar, indicating that changes among different biodiversity facets are asynchronous. Our study deepens the understanding of land‐use effects on soil nematode diversity across large spatial scales. Moreover, the detected asynchrony of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity highlights the necessity to monitor multiple facets of soil biodiversity in ecological studies such as those investigating environmental changes.