WP1 – Spatial scales

In order to enhance agricultural production by promoting ecosystem services, we need to know which management strategy affect ecosystem services at what spatial scale. It has been demonstrated that biodiversity can enhance agricultural production through delivery of supporting and regulating ecosystem services. Farmland biodiversity can be enhanced by local, on-field management, but it is also affected by the composition of the surrounding landscape. In particular, mobile organisms such as pollinators or natural enemies may spillover from semi-natural habitats to crop fields or from species-rich fields to species-poor fields.

While we are beginning to get a good understanding of the consequences of these spillover effects for biodiversity patterns in agricultural landscapes, much less is known about their consequences on ecosystem service provisioning. However, the spillover of ecosystem services from fields managed in a biodiversity friendly way to nearby conventionally managed ones is practically unexplored, and we do not know up to what distances crops may benefit from the surplus of the ecosystem services produced.

WP1 will address this knowledge gap and empirically examine up to what distances ecosystem services spill over from local hotspots of functional biodiversity into fields and crops. We focus on habitat types and types of management that are currently proposed as greening measures in the CAP reform and are believed to benefit ecosystem services that increase agricultural production. The results will feed into WP2 and WP4.

Objectives

• Quantifying landscape-level spillover of biodiversity and ecosystem services generated by permanent grasslands to surrounding arable crops
• Linking quality of ecological focus areas to habitat spillover of biodiversity and ecosystem services and to agricultural production
• Quantifying field- and landscape-level spillover of biodiversity and ecosystem services produced by crop diversification
• Determine the spatial scale affecting farmland ecosystem services