Can organic arable and silvoarable micro-farms contribute to biodiversity conservation? A survey of wild bees community structure in the Brabant Wallon province (Belgium)

Agricultural intensification has led to the simplification and homogeneization of landscapes, threatening farm-land biodiversity and its associated ecosystem services in the process (Newbold et al. 2015; Potts et al. 2016).Several options have been put forward to mitigate these adverse impacts, including the agri-environmentalschemes (AES, particularly “sown wildflower strips”, see Geslin et al. 2017), the promotion of organic agri-culture and the increase of in-site plant diversity. The latter aspect is also expected to contribute to the sustainable intensification of production while reducing conventional agricultural inputs (pesticides, fertilizers,renting pollinators, etc.) and/or to optimize and stabilize ecosystem services in time and space (Lichtenberg etal. 2017).In this context, we examined the contribution of organic diversified micro-farms (defined here as productionsites of less than 2 hectares with high in-site plant diversity) to the conservation of wild bees in a networkof production farms located in the Brabant Wallon province of Belgium

Can organic arable and silvoarable micro-farms contribute to biodiversityconservation? A survey of wild bees community structure in the Brabant Wallonprovince (Belgium) (PDF) Can organic arable and silvoarable micro-farms contribute to biodiversity conservation? A survey of wild bees community structure in the Brabant Wallon province (Belgium).

We examined the contribution of organic diversified micro-farms (defined here as productionsites of less than 2 hectares with high in-site plant diversity) to the conservation of wild bees in a networkof production farms located in the Brabant Wallon province of Belgium. Because wild bees are ecologically,functionally and phylogenetically diverse, displaying sometimes highly specialized interactions with floweringplants and nesting in a wide variety of substrates (Vereecken 2017), the conventional use of species richness asthe sole proxy for biodiversity generally fails to reflect the full impacts of land use and farming practices inparticular on their communities.Specifically, we asked the two following questions, (i) can arable and silvoarable micro-farms contribute to theconservation of wild bees as efficiently as semi-natural habitats or apple orchards?, (ii) do silvoarable micro-farms exhibit significant differences in functional and phylogenetic community structure compared to arablemicro-farms in the same landscape context? Can organic arable and silvoarable micro-farms contribute to biodiversity conservation? A survey of wild bees community structure in the Brabant Wallon province (Belgium)

Bestiaires

Bien des contes, récits animaliers, romans, poèmes, encyclopédies ou histoires naturelles accordent une place de choix aux animaux. Les bestiaires, plus que tout autre genre, leur donnent un statut privilégié. Les bestiaires médiévaux, par leurs pratiques diversifiées, posent la question suivante : comment faire entrer l’animal dans l’organisation et le pouvoir de signification du livre