Traditional semi-natural grassland management with heterogeneous mowing times enhances flower resources for pollinators in agricultural landscapes

For a diverse pollinator fauna it is important that pollen and nectar are available over the entire summer at spatially relevant scales. Semi-natural hay meadows are among the most important sources of flower resources for pollinators, but the resources are strongly affected by the timing of mowing. Management recommendations for hay meadows often prescribe late mowing on order to allow undisturbed flowering during most of the summer. Traditional practices, however, often include also earlier mowing. We investigate the link between the temporal variation of flower resources and traditional mowing practices of semi-natural hay meadows in a low-intensity agricultural landscape in Romania. In early August, we botanically surveyed meadows that were cut early, intermediately, or late in the season. We recorded all herb species, their phenological stage, and the number of reproductive units of each species. Data were analysed using DCA, LM and GLM. Plant species richness and composition are not affected by the time of mowing, but different sets of species flower in semi-natural grasslands with different mowing regimes. In August the proportion of species flowering and flower density are highest in the early-mown meadows due to re-flowering after mowing. Analyses of phenological stages indicate that late-mown meadows are the main pollen and nectar sources in July, whereas meadows mown early are the main resource from August to the end of the season. The results demonstrate that for pollinator conservation, heterogeneous mowing times within a landscape need to be encouraged when possible, and that strict focus on late mowing may lead to shortage of flower resources late in the summer. Studies of low-intensity agriculture has a great potential for learning about management methods that can be used in other parts of the world where traditional practices have been lost. Such studies can thereby contribute with important knowledge to manage global pollinator loss

Kunnskapsstatus for bruk av molekylære verktøy i kartlegging og overvåkning av biologisk mangfold i marine miljø

Source at https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/publikasjoner/2021/juni-2021/kunnskapsstatus-for-bruk-av-molekylare-verktoy-i-kartlegging-og-overvakning-av-biologisk-mangfold-i-marine-miljo/Denne rapporten er bestilt av Miljødirektoratet fra NorBOL (Norwegian Barcode of Life), et nasjonalt nettverk av forskningsinstitusjoner som koordineres av NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet. Universitetsmuseet i Bergen har hatt prosjektledelsen. Rapporten gir en oppsummering av dagens status på DNA-basert metodikk som verktøy i kartlegging og overvåking av biologisk mangfold i det marine miljø. Fokus har vært på innsamlingsmetodikk og protokoller for DNA-analyser av arter og artsgrupper. Metodikken er evaluert opp mot kartleggings- og overvåkingsaktivitet i regi av Miljødirektoratet, og kommer med anbefalinger for videre framdrift for å ta metodikken i bruk i nasjonal kartlegging og overvåking. Rapporten har også en gjennomgang og evaluering av eksisterende referansemateriale og referansesekvenser for relevante arter og artsgrupper som inngår i Miljødirektoratets kartleggings- og overvåkingsaktivitet

Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative & Biodiversity Infrastructure

Norwegian Biodiversity Information centre (NBIC) shares information about Norwegian species, habitats and ecosystems. One of the key tasks is to maintain an updated taxonomical and nomenclatural backbone “Norwegian Taxonomic backbone” (Artsnavnebase) for species. Launched in 2009, the backbone contains more than 185 000 scientific names, as well as 45 000 names in Norwegian (two languages) and Northern Sami. “Norwegian Taxonomic backbone” delivers names and taxonomic information to scientific institutions and museums across the country and is used for both management and research purposes as well as by general public. Additionally, the database has contributed more than 33500 names to the construction of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) taxonomy. Another major task is the Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative (NTI) which was established in 2009 with the goal of improving knowledge about Norwegian biodiversity with special emphasis on poorly known species. In addition, the surveys provide information about distributions of species in Norway and their habitat requirements. NTI collaborates with Norwegian Barcode of Life (NorBOL) and contributes into building up a comprehensive library of standardized DNA sequences (DNA barcodes) and supports research school in biosystematics (ForBio). Swedish and Norwegian taxonomy initiatives work cooperatively to increase the collective knowledge on poorly known species, and as a result, more than 3 000 species new to the country in both Sweden and Norway has been found, of which about a third being new to science. NBIC is in a process of developing and collating a trait database “Trait bank” (Egenskapsbank) for Norwegian species and habitats. Trait bank will describe and combine information about species traits on morphology, physiology and ecology etc. The aim is to also store information about Norwegian habitat types described based on Nature in Norway -system and establish the connections between habitats and species using them. Species trait data relevant for Norwegian species will be extracted from existing databases and other data sources. The first information from this work will be made available through 2020 and is going to be useful for research, conservation and area planning

Traditional semi-natural grassland management with heterogeneous mowing times enhances flower resources for pollinators in agricultural landscapes

For a diverse pollinator fauna it is important that pollen and nectar are available over the entire summer at spatially relevant scales. Semi-natural hay meadows are among the most important sources of flower resources for pollinators, but the resources are strongly affected by the timing of mowing. Management recommendations for hay meadows often prescribe late mowing on order to allow undisturbed flowering during most of the summer. Traditional practices, however, often include also earlier mowing. We investigate the link between the temporal variation of flower resources and traditional mowing practices of semi-natural hay meadows in a low-intensity agricultural landscape in Romania. In early August, we botanically surveyed meadows that were cut early, intermediately, or late in the season. We recorded all herb species, their phenological stage, and the number of reproductive units of each species. Data were analysed using DCA, LM and GLM. Plant species richness and composition are not affected by the time of mowing, but different sets of species flower in semi-natural grasslands with different mowing regimes. In August the proportion of species flowering and flower density are highest in the early-mown meadows due to re-flowering after mowing. Analyses of phenological stages indicate that late-mown meadows are the main pollen and nectar sources in July, whereas meadows mown early are the main resource from August to the end of the season. The results demonstrate that for pollinator conservation, heterogeneous mowing times within a landscape need to be encouraged when possible, and that strict focus on late mowing may lead to shortage of flower resources late in the summer. Studies of low-intensity agriculture has a great potential for learning about management methods that can be used in other parts of the world where traditional practices have been lost. Such studies can thereby contribute with important knowledge to manage global pollinator loss.publishedVersio

Reusable Ontology Modelling Patterns for Biodiversity Data with Reasonable Ontology Templates (OTTR)

The Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (NBIC) is currently building a traitbank for Norwegian species. The purpose of the NBIC TraitBank is to enhance sharing of traits and other information about species to support conservation actions and ecological research. The traitbank will cover a subset of traits for all multicellular species and taxa that are found in Norway. Observations of traits, collected through citizen science as well as by experts, are connected to the NBIC TraitBank ontology, forming a knowledge base. We have modeled TraitBank’s ontology in accordance with NBIC’s data management requirements, focusing on the domain knowledge necessary for ontology-based data integration of internal databases and queries specified by use cases. Our initial steps in ontology construction included outlining competency questions, which are natural language sentences expressing the questions system users expect an ontology to answer (Bezerra et al. 2013, Ren et al. 2014). The ontology for the TraitBank is populated using expert input (manual entry) and through harvesting of traits from existing internal databases at NBIC. We will present our experiences with implementing Reasonable Ontology Templates (OTTR) (Skjæveland et al. 2021) as the means for modeling the ontology and populating the TraitBank ontology. OTTR is a language for formally representing and instantiating ontology modeling patterns and is designed to support knowledge base construction and interaction at a higher level of abstraction. In the case of the TraitBank, ontology patterns are edited and published using a Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) extension for OTTR (FloSchroeder 2022), thereby providing a tool for the domain expert to work directly with templates. We build the TraitBank ontology by instantiating the templates directly in SMW as wiki pages. We argue that templates are an effective means to support the integration and use of digital biodiversity data in transparent ways, leading to successful collaboration and reuse of data. Following the "Don't repeat yourself" (DRY) principle of software development (Hunt and Thomas 1999), OTTR templates lend themselves well to easier ontology maintenance, allowing updates to occur through changes in individual template definitions rather than to repeated statements spread throughout the ontology. OTTR reshapes how domain experts work with ontologies and the data connected to the knowledge base, lifting the biodiversity expert away from dealing directly with logical axioms and Web Ontology Language (OWL). The template libraries have the power to improve international collaboration, making it easier to exchange and reuse specific templates and suggest improvements. Our templates include mappings to standards developed by Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and biodiversity-related ontologies, linking to the international community. Use of OTTR supports the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data and demonstrates a new technology that can support the creation of an extensive online network of knowledge.Example: Scientific Name The NBIC uses Scientific Name as the main identifier and means to track a species. The OTTR template shown below captures the NBIC’s modelling pattern for Scientific Name. The signature of the template specifies the Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) of the template (adb-t:ScientificName), and six parameters (where ?iri is the 1st parameter). The parameters are used in the body of the template and define how instances of the template are expanded to Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements. Template instance expansion is done in a recursive manner, similar to many macro programming languages.With the OTTR template definition given in Fig. 1, a template instance can be expanded, as shown in the example for Metopa glacialis Fig. 2.The benefits of using the OTTR framework is that modeling patterns are explicitly represented as an OTTR template, allowing for instances of patterns to be compactly and consistently captured. The format of template instances lends itself to instantiation from tabular data sources like spreadsheets and databases

Data on flower resources for polliantors in Romanian semi-natural grasslands mown at different times

Semi-natural grasslands are hotspots of biodiversity in Europe and provide amounts of flower resources for pollinators. We present data on composition and spatial turnover of herb species and flower resources in and between semi-natural grasslands in Romania mown at different times during the growth season (early, intermediate, late). The data include herb species occurrences, their phenological stage, flower resources, and measures of spatial turnover of the species occurrences and flower resources based on Detrended Correspondence Analyses (DCA), in the start of August. The dataset is provided as supplementary material and associated with the research article “Traditional semi-natural grassland management with heterogeneous mowing times enhances flower resources for pollinators in agricultural landscapes” [1] Johansen et al.. See Johansen et al. for data interpretation.publishedVersio