Description:
Agricultural intensification (AI) is a major driver of losses in agrobiodiversity and associated ecosystem functions such as biological control, thereby indirectly affecting agricultural production. AI may influence community structure, composition and variability in both space and time, by differently affecting species with different traits. Species at higher trophic levels, with higher specialization and lower dispersal abilities, are expected to be more vulnerable to AI and have high spatio-temporal population and food-web dynamic. Hence, understanding patterns of agrobiodiversity and their associated trophic interactions, as well as species turnover due to AI, requires a focus on the spatio-temporal changes in communities belonging to different feeding guilds and trophic levels. The aim of this study is to address these patterns in agrobiodiversity and to investigate their relation to biological-control functioning in different land-use systems. This work is part of the AGRIPOPES project (http://agripopes.net) and comprises three field studies, carried out in the surroundings of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany ...