Preserving Biodiversity: The Role of Natural Vegetation in Countering Insect Decline Near Farmlands
Like many other types of organisms, the abundance and variety of insects in many places has been steadily declining over recent decades. While lots of factors possibly contribute to this decline, a key contributor is often the steady conversion of natural landscapes to commercial agriculture.
One way to halt insect decline could be to maintain small patches of natural vegetation, such as wetlands, uncut grasslands or woodland thickets, adjacent to agricultural fields.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
We set up small tent-like traps next to farmed fields across southern Ontario to see what environmental factors had the greatest impact on the biodiversity of insects and other terrestrial arthropods.
We found that by maintaining substantial variation in the variety of plants and the amount of spatial cover in these remnant patches of vegetation an enormous variety of invertebrate species could be maintained: over 10,000 species alone across 15 farms.
This suggests that maintaining patches of natural vegetation along the margins of farmed fields could be a particularly effective way to counter declines in insect biodiversity.
Read the paper —Spatial and seasonal determinants of arthropod community composition across an agro-ecosystem landscape by: P. Burgess, G.S. Betini, A. Cholewka, J.R. deWaard, S. deWaard, C. Griswold, P.D.N. Hebert, A. MacDougall, K.S. McCann, J. McGroarty, E. Miller, K. Perez, S. Ratnasingham, C. Reisiger, D. Steinke, E. Wright, E. Zakharov, and J.M. Fryxell.
