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Apolipoprotein E (ApoE), a cholesterol transporter and an immunomodulator, is brain protective after experimental stroke and implicated in brain repair. Here, we study the involvement of ApoE in the restoration of brain function after experimental stroke, by using animal housing conditions that differentially improve recovery after occlusion of the middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). We found
Abstract in UndeterminedIn recent years, there has been a marked proliferation in the literature on economic approaches to ecosystem management, which has created a subsequent need for real understanding of the scope and the limits of the economic approaches to ecosystems and biodiversity. Within this Handbook, carefully commissioned original contributions from acknowledged experts in the field ad
Pollinator declines have raised concerns about the persistence of plant species that depend on insect pollination, in particular by bees, for their reproduction. The impact of pollinator declines remains unknown for species-rich plant communities found in temperate seminatural grasslands. We investigated effects of land-use intensity in the surrounding landscape on the distribution of plant traits
Protecting semi-natural grasslands may through spill-over benefit species richness and abundance of flower-visiting insects in linear habitats, such as uncultivated field boundaries, in agricultural landscapes. However, whether local diversity increases both with decreasing distance from potential source habitats and increasing landscape heterogeneity is poorly known due to a general lack of studi
Pollination is an essential process in the sexual reproduction of seed plants and a key ecosystem service to human welfare. Animal pollinators decline as a consequence of five major global change pressures: climate change, landscape alteration, agricultural intensification, non-native species, and spread of pathogens. These pressures, which differ in their biotic or abiotic nature and their spatio
Pollinator populations have suffered severe declines in many industrialised countries due to reduced floral and nesting resources, brought on by agricultural intensification. One potential method of mitigating these effects is creating flower strips. Most previous studies have shown higher pollinator abundances in flower strips, but none have been able to demonstrate increased pollinator abundance
Increasing landscape heterogeneity and organic farming practices are known to enhance species richness in agroecosystems. However, little is known about the consequences of these management options on other biodiversity components such as community composition, phylogenetic structure and functional diversity which may be more closely linked to ecosystem
Agricultural intensification has resulted in large-scale loss of bee pollinators, but while some species have been negatively affected others seem to endure changed conditions. It has been suggested that certain morphological, ecological and life-history traits make some species more vulnerable to landscape changes. Information on which traits make species vulnerable and why may aid conservation o
Agricultural intensification has been vital for meeting global food demand but has caused environmental degradation. This has disrupted the ability of soil to provide vital ecosystem services. Organic farming is often thought to conserve and utilise soil ecosystem services, and thus be a more sustainable method of food production than conventional farming. However, evidence for this is equivocal,
Having historically been abundant throughout Europe, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) has in recent decades suffered severe population declines in many urban and rural areas. The decline in rural environments is believed to be caused by agricultural intensification, which has resulted in landscape simplification. We used giving-up densities (GUDs) of house sparrows feeding in artificial food
Pollination is a key ecosystem service which most often has been studied in isolation although effects of pollination on seed set might depend on, and interact with, other services important for crop production. We tested three competing hypotheses on how insect pollination and pest control might jointly affect seed set: independent, compensatory or synergistic effects. For this, we performed a ca
Crop diversification and maintenance of semi-natural habitats (grasslands and field boundaries) are suggested to enhance farmland biodiversity, but the relative importance of these factors remains poorly known. We evaluated how crop diversity and availability of semi-natural grasslands at a landscape-scale interacted with local farming management (three management types from low to high intensity:
It has been suggested that the widespread use of neonicotinoid insecticides threatens bees, but research on this topic has been surrounded by controversy. In order to synthesize which research approaches have been used to examine the effect of neonicotinoids on bees and to identify knowledge gaps, we systematically reviewed research on this subject that was available on the Web of Science and PubM
Agriculture's reliance on ecosystem services creates economic and ecological interdependencies between crop production and biodiversity. Interactions with mobile organisms are particularly complex because they depend on the spatial configuration of habitat at large scales. As such conserving habitat is likely to benefit multiple farmers whereas conservation costs are born individually, creating po
Background: Soils contain the largest stock of organic carbon (C) in terrestrial ecosystems and changes in soil C stocks may significantly affect atmospheric CO2. A significant part of soil C is present in cultivated soils that occupy about 35 % of the global land surface. Agricultural intensification has led to practices that may decrease soil organic carbon (SOC), and agricultural management has
Research relating to ecosystem services has increased, partly because of drastic declines in biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. However, the mechanistic linkages between land use, biodiversity and service provision are poorly understood and synthesized. This is particularly true for many ecosystem services provided by mobile organisms such as natural enemies to crop pests. These species are
Recent research has shown that agricultural management affects microbial biomass and community composition. We investigated the functional implications of such effects in terms of barley biomass production and nutrient acquisition, and whether changes in barley nutrient status affected aphid fecundity. Soils were collected from conventional, ley and organic arable fields and used as inocula in a g
Bumblebee communities and their foraging resources were surveyed in south Swedish agricultural landscapes of contrasting complexity, defined by the size of arable fields and the amount of permanent grazed pastures. After the flowering of oilseed rape (OSR), simplified landscapes contained substantially less herbaceous flower resources and a lower proportion of perennials, compared to complex ones.
We tested how dispersal capacity, host plant specificity and reproductive rate influenced the effects of farming system and landscape composition on butterfly species richness and abundance. In no case did variation in these traits explain species responses to organic farming, indicating that all species benefit equally. In contrast, butterflies with high mobility and reproductive rate were dispro
CapsuleHouse Sparrow (Passer domesticus) populations in south Swedish farmland are not affected by supplemental winter feeding, irrespective of agricultural landscape type or presence of animal husbandry, although winter populations declined more in mixed farmland and when farms contained animal husbandry. AimsTo investigate whether food limitation of House Sparrow population size during the winte
