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      A trait‐based approach to plant species selection to increase functionality of farmland vegetative strips

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          Abstract

          1. Farmland vegetative strips are a proven source of support for ecosystem services and are globally used to mitigate effects of agricultural intensification. However, increasing pressures on agricultural land require increases in their functionality, such as supporting multiple ecosystem services concurrently.

          2. The plant species sown in a vegetative strip seed mix determine the establishment, plant community, and ecosystem services that are supported. Currently, there is no clearly defined or structured method to select plant species for multifunctional vegetative strips.

          3. Plant traits determine how plants support ecosystem services. Also, the establishment and persistence of plant communities is influenced by key internal and external factors. We propose a novel, evidence‐informed method of multifunctional vegetative strip design based on these essential traits and factors.

          4. This study had three distinct stages. The first identified plant traits that support water quality protection, pollinators and/or crop pest natural enemies, using existing research evidence. We then identified key factors affecting plant community establishment and persistence. Finally, we applied these standardized methods to design a multifunctional vegetative strip for a specific case study (UK lowland farmland).

          5. Key plant traits identified, included floral display size, flower color, nectar content, leaf surface area, leaf trichome density, percentage fine roots, root length, rooting depth, and root density. Key internal and external establishment factors included life history, native status, distribution, established competitive strategy, associated floristic diversity, flowering time and duration, and preferred soil type and pH. In the United Kingdom case study, we used five different plant traits and all of the identified factors to design a seed mix for a multifunctional vegetative strip.

          6. We present a transferable method of vegetative strip design that can be adapted for other ecosystem services and climates. It provides landowners and advisors with an evidence‐informed approach to increase field margin functionality while supporting farmland biodiversity.

          OPEN RESEARCH BADGES

          This article has earned an Open Data Badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8t52n38.

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          Most cited references42

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          Crop pollination from native bees at risk from agricultural intensification.

          Ecosystem services are critical to human survival; in selected cases, maintaining these services provides a powerful argument for conserving biodiversity. Yet, the ecological and economic underpinnings of most services are poorly understood, impeding their conservation and management. For centuries, farmers have imported colonies of European honey bees (Apis mellifera) to fields and orchards for pollination services. These colonies are becoming increasingly scarce, however, because of diseases, pesticides, and other impacts. Native bee communities also provide pollination services, but the amount they provide and how this varies with land management practices are unknown. Here, we document the individual species and aggregate community contributions of native bees to crop pollination, on farms that varied both in their proximity to natural habitat and management type (organic versus conventional). On organic farms near natural habitat, we found that native bee communities could provide full pollination services even for a crop with heavy pollination requirements (e.g., watermelon, Citrullus lanatus), without the intervention of managed honey bees. All other farms, however, experienced greatly reduced diversity and abundance of native bees, resulting in insufficient pollination services from native bees alone. We found that diversity was essential for sustaining the service, because of year-to-year variation in community composition. Continued degradation of the agro-natural landscape will destroy this "free" service, but conservation and restoration of bee habitat are potentially viable economic alternatives for reducing dependence on managed honey bees.
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            Incorporating plant functional diversity effects in ecosystem service assessments.

            Global environmental change affects the sustained provision of a wide set of ecosystem services. Although the delivery of ecosystem services is strongly affected by abiotic drivers and direct land use effects, it is also modulated by the functional diversity of biological communities (the value, range, and relative abundance of functional traits in a given ecosystem). The focus of this article is on integrating the different possible mechanisms by which functional diversity affects ecosystem properties that are directly relevant to ecosystem services. We propose a systematic way for progressing in understanding how land cover change affects these ecosystem properties through functional diversity modifications. Models on links between ecosystem properties and the local mean, range, and distribution of plant trait values are numerous, but they have been scattered in the literature, with varying degrees of empirical support and varying functional diversity components analyzed. Here we articulate these different components in a single conceptual and methodological framework that allows testing them in combination. We illustrate our approach with examples from the literature and apply the proposed framework to a grassland system in the central French Alps in which functional diversity, by responding to land use change, alters the provision of ecosystem services important to local stakeholders. We claim that our framework contributes to opening a new area of research at the interface of land change science and fundamental ecology.
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              Towards an assessment of multiple ecosystem processes and services via functional traits

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                claire.cresswell@sparsholt.ac.uk
                Journal
                Ecol Evol
                Ecol Evol
                10.1002/(ISSN)2045-7758
                ECE3
                Ecology and Evolution
                John Wiley and Sons Inc. (Hoboken )
                2045-7758
                01 April 2019
                April 2019
                : 9
                : 8 ( doiID: 10.1002/ece3.2019.9.issue-8 )
                : 4532-4543
                Affiliations
                [ 1 ] University Centre Sparsholt Winchester, Hampshire UK
                [ 2 ] Corteva Agriscience™ Abingdon, Oxfordshire UK
                [ 3 ] Harper Adams University Newport, Shropshire UK
                Author notes
                [*] [* ] Correspondence

                Claire J. Cresswell, University Centre Sparsholt, Winchester, Hampshire, UK.

                Email: claire.cresswell@ 123456sparsholt.ac.uk

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8530-8631
                Article
                ECE35047
                10.1002/ece3.5047
                6476755
                31031925
                e7a60109-f3c4-40ea-82c5-53802a82782e
                © 2019 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

                This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 13 August 2018
                : 15 February 2019
                : 18 February 2019
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 5, Pages: 12, Words: 8952
                Funding
                Funded by: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
                Award ID: BB/M503411/1
                Funded by: Syngenta Ltd
                Funded by: Harper Adams University
                Categories
                Original Research
                Original Research
                Custom metadata
                2.0
                ece35047
                April 2019
                Converter:WILEY_ML3GV2_TO_NLMPMC version:5.6.2.1 mode:remove_FC converted:22.04.2019

                Evolutionary Biology
                biological control,ecosystem services,environmental factors,field margin,plant characteristics,plant traits,pollination,water quality protection

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