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Summary1. Understanding the environmental factors that structure biodiversity and food webs among communities is central to assess and mitigate the impact of landscape changes. 2. Wildflower strips are ecological compensation areas established in farmland to increase pollination services and biological control of crop pests and to conserve insect diversity. They are arranged in networks in order to favour high species richness and abundance of the fauna. 3. We describe results from experimental wildflower strips in a fragmented agricultural landscape, comparing the importance of landscape, of spatial arrangement and of vegetation on the diversity and abundance of trap-nesting bees, wasps and their enemies, and the structure of their food webs. 4. The proportion of forest cover close to the wildflower strips and the landscape heterogeneity stood out as the most influential landscape elements, resulting in a more complex trap-nest community with higher abundance and richness of hosts, and with more links between species in the food webs and a higher diversity of interactions. We disentangled the underlying mechanisms for variation in these quantitative food web metrics. 5. We conclude that in order to increase the diversity and abundance of pollinators and biological control agents and to favour a potentially stable community of cavity-nesting hymenoptera in wildflower strips, more investment is needed in the conservation and establishment of forest habitats within agro-ecosystems, as a reservoir of beneficial insect populations.

Abstract. Declining plant species richness in agro-ecosystems and thus reduced habitat quality can have cascading effects on ecosystem functioning, leading to reduced pollination and biological control. Here we test if plant diversity can affect arthropod diversity and abundance on a very small scale, manipulating plant species richness (2, 6, 12 and 20 sown species) in small adjacent subplots (6 3 9 m) in 10 wildflower strips in an agricultural landscape. We simultaneously analyzed the effect of plant species richness, vegetation structure, and plant composition on the species richness and abundance of cavity-nesting wild bees, wasps, their prey and natural enemies, and on the structure of their food webs. By separating the trap-nesting species into functional groups according to their prey, we aimed to understand the underlying patterns for the effects of plant diversity. Increasing plant species richness had a significant effect only on spider-predating wasps, the group of wasps trophically most distant from plants. In contrast, bees and food-web structure were unaffected by plant diversity. Spider-predating wasp abundance negatively correlated with the abundance of spiders, suggesting top-down control. Interestingly, the abundance of spiders was the only variable that was strongly affected by plant composition. The hypothesis that the effect of plant diversity decreases with increasing trophic level is not supported by our study, and the mobility of species appears to play a greater role at this small spatial scale.

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