Agricultural Biodiversity Trend Monitoring

The use of trap nests for recording above-ground-nesting wild bees enables the project's scientists to document and quantify trophic interactions between wild bees, wasps and parasitoids beyond recording species composition. Nesting material can draw conclusions about the food resources used (pollen analysis) and the available resources of the surrounding agricultural landscape and provide information on pathogens and pesticide residues. This module focuses on developing and establishing molecular biological workflows and pipelines that will use standardised trap nests as a valuable information source for monitoring programs.

A digital platform for wild and honeybee data is being developed at the Institute for Bee Protection at the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) in Braunschweig (Germany). This platform aims to gather and harmonise heterogeneous spatiotemporal data to establish nationwide cooperation among specialist institutes and MonViA project partners. For example, land use, environmental, and climate data are available for long-term spatiotemporal trend analyses on wild and honeybee populations.

This module monitors the trends of parasitic wasps and flies or specialised predators such as hoverflies, ladybirds, or pirate bugs, all of which are closely intertwined with their host and prey species' population dynamics, therefore a principal function in food webs. They are essential indicators for the ecosystem service ‘pest control’ and indicate the presence of certain host species. Such trend monitoring aims to provide data for long-term population changes of these beneficial insects as a function of land use and other exogenous factors (e.g. climate changes).

Monitoring of soil organisms aims to develop a monitoring concept on the effects of cultivation measures on the diversity and function of earthworm communities as a basis for a national cost-effective and personnel-saving monitoring. On this basis, long-term trends in the biodiversity of earthworm communities in Germany's specific agricultural areas can be derived.

The pests monitoring module aims to develop a pest and pathogen monitoring framework on cultivated plants and test it on a small scale. Gradually, crops, wine and apple production will be examined and, if necessary, extended by further cultivations later. Pests and pathogens are essential components of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes and account for a significant proportion of the biomass. Furthermore, they are a vital food resource for higher trophic levels in predator-prey relationships. Pests are indicators of the natural regulatory capacity of agroecosystems, including the direct and indirect effects of interventions such as plant protection measures.

The module on ‘monitoring vegetation’ aims to cover all different vegetation types within the agricultural landscape. The module on ‘arable plant monitoring’ focuses on weed plants within arable fields, which form the most significant part of the total agricultural area. Especially intensively managed arable fields suffer from a low arable plant diversity. Different survey methods for arable weeds will be tested in the module on ‘arable plant monitoring’. The aim is to identify a process, which fits best to the goals of a national monitoring program.