Response of wild bee diversity, abundance, and functional traits to vineyard inter‐row management intensity and landscape diversity across Europe

Abstract

Agricultural intensification is a major driver of wild bee decline. Vineyards may be inhabited by plant and animal species, especially when the inter‐row space is vegetated with spontaneous vegetation or cover crops. Wild bees depend on floral resources and suitable nesting sites which may be found in vineyard inter‐rows or in viticultural landscapes. Inter‐row vegetation is managed by mulching, tillage, and/or herbicide application and results in habitat degradation when applied intensively. Here, we hypothesize that lower vegetation management intensities, higher floral resources, and landscape diversity affect wild bee diversity and abundance dependent on their functional traits. We sampled wild bees semi‐quantitatively in 63 vineyards representing different vegetation management intensities across Europe in 2016. A proxy for floral resource availability was based on visual flower cover estimations. Management intensity was assessed by vegetation cover (%) twice a year per vineyard. The Shannon Landscape Diversity Index was used as a proxy for landscape diversity within a 750 m radius around each vineyard center point. Wild bee communities were clustered by country. At the country level, between 20 and 64 wild bee species were identified. Increased floral resource availability and extensive vegetation management both affected wild bee diversity and abundance in vineyards strongly positively. Increased landscape diversity had a small positive effect on wild bee diversity but compensated for the negative effect of low floral resource availability by increasing eusocial bee abundance. We conclude that wild bee diversity and abundance in vineyards is efficiently promoted by increasing floral resources and reducing vegetation management frequency. High landscape diversity further compensates for low floral resources in vineyards and increases pollinating insect abundance in viticulture landscapes.

Diverging Effects of Landscape Factors and Inter-Row Management on the Abundance of Beneficial and Herbivorous Arthropods in Andalusian Vineyards (Spain)

“…In the case of parasitoids, the positive synergistic effect between surrounding vineyard area and vegetation cover within the sampled vineyards might also be due to the host- and habitat-specification of parasitoids [64,83] and thus to their stronger response to landscape complexity at smaller scales [28]. Our results on parasitoids underline previous findings that vegetation cover could be beneficial for natural enemies [38,84,85,86] by providing resources such as nectar, pollen, alternative hosts and shelter [40,70,87,88].…”

“…Also, improved local habitat quality, e.g., via vegetation cover, can enhance natural enemy populations and can be advantageous for crop production, especially in simple structured landscapes [2,9,26,34,35]. Ground cover with perennial crops commonly stimulates the abundance of beneficial arthropods [36,37,38,39,40] but this effect depends on various factors such as the type, composition and management of the cover crop; type and management of the field crop; type of natural enemies and pest arthropods; and climatic conditions [33,41,42,43]. However, most previous studies did not consider possible synergistic effects between ground cover and surrounding landscape structure on natural enemy populations in perennial crop fields [44,45].…”

Organic management and landscape heterogeneity combine to sustain multifunctional bird communities in European vineyards

“…Previous studies have highlighted that the local potential for biocontrol in vineyards was driven by the diversity of natural enemies and trait complementarities among predators of wine pests, and that this potential was narrowly linked to landscape heterogeneity (Muneret et al, 2019;Redhead et al, 2020). Other services provided by biodiversity, such as pollination, are also favoured by the same type of landscape management (Kratschmer et al, 2019), although tradeoffs may also occur between services (Brambilla, Ilahiane, et al, 2017).…”

Effects of vineyard inter-row management on the diversity and abundance of plants and surface-dwelling invertebrates in Central Romania

“…Spontaneous vegetation and/ or seeded cover crops have a great impact on abundance and diversity of beneficial arthropods in vineyards (Buchholz et al 2017;Franin et al 2016). Flowering plants provide nectar and pollen resources to flower-visiting insects (Ambrosino et al 2006;Kratschmer et al 2019). Vegetation cover plays an important role in enhancing the abundance and diversity of arthropod predators and consequently reduces pest densities (Rusch et al 2017).…”