Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the global agricultural footprint expands, it is increasingly important to address the link between the resource pulses characteristic of monoculture farming and wildlife epidemiology. To understand how mass-flowering crops impact host communities and subsequently amplify or dilute parasitism, we surveyed wild and managed bees in a monoculture landscape with varying degrees of floral diversification. We screened 1509 bees from 16 genera in sunflower fields and in non-crop flowering habitat across 200 km of the California Central Valley.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: We have characterised 997 hip fracture patients from a representative 45 Spanish hospitals, and followed them up prospectively for up to 4 months. Despite suboptimal surgical delays (average 59.1 hours), in-hospital mortality was lower than in Northern European cohorts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAgricultural intensification is a leading cause of global biodiversity loss, which can reduce the provisioning of ecosystem services in managed ecosystems. Organic farming and plant diversification are farm management schemes that may mitigate potential ecological harm by increasing species richness and boosting related ecosystem services to agroecosystems. What remains unclear is the extent to which farm management schemes affect biodiversity components other than species richness, and whether impacts differ across spatial scales and landscape contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe delivery of ecosystem services by mobile organisms depends on the distribution of those organisms, which is, in turn, affected by resources at local and landscape scales. Pollinator-dependent crops rely on mobile animals like bees for crop production, and the spatial relationship between floral resources and nest location for these central-place foragers influences the delivery of pollination services. Current models that map pollination coverage in agricultural regions utilize landscape-level estimates of floral availability and nesting incidence inferred from expert opinion, rather than direct assessments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is compelling evidence that more diverse ecosystems deliver greater benefits to people, and these ecosystem services have become a key argument for biodiversity conservation. However, it is unclear how much biodiversity is needed to deliver ecosystem services in a cost-effective way. Here we show that, while the contribution of wild bees to crop production is significant, service delivery is restricted to a limited subset of all known bee species.
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