Abstract
In agricultural landscapes, values for nature conservation are concentrated in habitat fragments, which are highly dynamic. For many flowering plant species these patches are a refugium. An important question is whether populations of plant species that are meant to be conserved or restored (target species), are adapted to the man-affected landscape. Single-species metapopulations of plants are attected by the composition of the plant community , both direct I y (competition, facilitation) or indirectly (via their impact on the composition of the community of insect pollinators). Insects visiting wild flowers are also important for the background pollination of crops in agricultural landscapes. Due to management practices in this landscape plant diversity and species composition change rapidly. In the current project a number of target plant species will be investigated on their pollination system, their dependence for seed set on particular insect species (bee, syrphid or butterfly), the flower constancy of particular insects and the pollen flow between patches varying in insect diversity. After a field survey in three agricultural landscapes differing in management intensity, manipulative field experiments will be performed to analyze the dependence of seed set on aspects of plant-pollinator community diversity. These experimental analyses provide the basis for a synthesis in terms of metacommunity dynamics as related to local management. For the latter purpose, results from this project will be made applicable to be used in a spatially explicit landscape model (project 2), thus providing a basis for simulating the conditions to increase biodiversity in an agricultural landscape.
Netherlands