Co-creating sustainability indicators for the local water-energy-food nexus.

Sustainability indicators have become essential tools to deal with compartmentalized resources planning and management in cities. The development of water, energy, and food nexus (WEF nexus) indicators is a prominent goal of current research, but the focus is mainly on economic issues and material flows. Attention to the local scale and context, social aspects, and the inclusion of non-academic actors is mostly lacking.

Appraising strategic adaptive management as a process of organizational learning.

Adaptive management is a systematic approach for linking learning with implementation to facilitate ongoing improvement in natural resource management. The idea of learning from experience and adapting subsequent policies, strategies and actions, is intuitively appealing. However, application of adaptive management has been hindered by several obstacles, including a paucity of documented lessons from existing adaptive management practices and inadequate attention to the complex social aspects of learning.

Video monitoring of brown planthopper predation in rice shows flaws of sentinel methods.

Immobilized preys are routinely used in agro-ecological exposure studies to quantify predation of pests under field conditions, but this method has not been validated. Our purpose was to determine the validity of using immobilized adults of the major rice pest Nilaparvata lugens, brown plant hopper (BPH), as sentinels. We used direct observation by video recording to determine the causal agents of removal of field exposed BPH sentinels with two experiments: 1) we recorded removal events of dead, immobilized BPH; and 2) we compared removal of (i) dead, immobilized BPH, (ii) live, immobilized BPH, and (iii) live, mobile BPH.

Modification and Application of a Leaf Blower-vac for Field Sampling of Arthropods.

Rice fields host a large diversity of arthropods, but investigating their population dynamics and interactions is challenging. Here we describe the modification and application of a leaf blower-vac for suction sampling of arthropod populations in rice. When used in combination with an enclosure, application of this sampling device provides absolute estimates of the populations of arthropods as numbers per standardized sampling area.

Spatial and temporal variation of metal concentrations in adult honeybees (Apis mellifera L.).

Honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) have great potential for detecting and monitoring environmental pollution, given their wide-ranging foraging behaviour. Previous studies have demonstrated that concentrations of metals in adult honeybees were significantly higher at polluted than at control locations.

Assessment of the potential of ecolabels to promote agrobiodiversity.

We conducted a study to assess to what extent current ecolabels contain standards that stimulate conservation and sustainable use of on-farm biodiversity of agricultural landscapes (agrobiodiversity). First, we developed an agrobiodiversity management yardstick to assess and compare the labeling schemes of ecolabels for arable farming. Key characteristics of the yardstick are the five levels linking the abstract notion of agrobiodiversity management to concrete measures on a farm and its foundation upon expert judgment regarding the effect of farming practices on agrobiodiversity.