Filtyp
Honeybees might outcompete wild bees by depleting common resources, possibly more so in simplified landscapes where flower-rich habitats have been lost. We tested this by experimentally adding honeybee hives to nine sites while ensuring that ten additional sites were free from hives. The landscape surrounding each geographically separated site either held low (homogeneous landscape) or high (heter
Plant-feeding insects reduce yields substantially in all major crops despite considerable crop protection efforts. A lack of long-term monitoring data and insufficient ecological knowledge of pest insects limit our possibilities to characterize drivers of change in their abundances. We demonstrate how a suite of complementary methods and data sources can be used to analyse historical shifts in pes
In saline soils, the severity of drought for the soil microbial community is exacerbated by accumulating concentrations of salts during drying. In this study we investigated how bacterial growth and respiration responses to drying-rewetting were affected by salinity. To do this, we adjusted a non-saline soil to four different salinities (0, 2, 7 and 22 mg NaCl g−1), followed by addition of plant m
Measures of functional diversity are expected to predict community responses to land use and environmental change because, in contrast to taxonomic diversity, it is based on species traits rather than their identity. Here, we investigated the impact of landscape homogenisation on plants, butterflies and birds in terms of the proportion of arable field cover in southern Finland at local (0.25 km2)
DC230036_proof.pdf Physical Activity and the Development of Islet Autoimmunity and Type 1 Diabetes in 5–15-Year-Old Children Followed in the TEDDY Study Xiang Liu, Suzanne Bennett Johnson, Kristian F. Lynch, Kerry Cordan, Russell Pate, Martha D. Butterworth, Åke Lernmark, William A. Hagopian, Marian J. Rewers, Richard A. McIndoe, Jorma Toppari, Anette-G. Ziegler, Beena Akolkar, Jeffrey P. Krischer
https://www.teddy.lu.se/sites/teddy.lu.se/files/2023-11/150_2.pdf - 2026-05-06
Interactions between metals and natural organic matter (NOM) are of great environmental importance and one of the key factors influencing hydrolysis, solubility, and speciation of the metals. However, studying geochemically relevant metals like Al, Fe, and Cu is sometimes associated with analytical problems; for example Fe and Cu are both redox active. Gallium (Ga) is a non-redox active metal that
The landscape matrix is suggested to influence the effect of habitat fragmentation on species richness, but the generality of this prediction has not been tested. Here, we used data from 10 independent studies on butterfly species richness, where the matrix surrounding grassland patches was dominated by either forest or arable land to test if matrix land use influenced the response of species rich
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
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
Wild and managed bees are well documented as effective pollinators of global crops of economic importance. However, the contributions by pollinators other than bees have been little explored despite their potential to contribute to crop production and stability in the face of environmental change. Non-bee pollinators include flies, beetles, moths, butterflies, wasps, ants, birds, and bats, among o
Biological control, an essential ecosystem service to agriculture, can be affected by ecological processes operating at landscape scales. Here we assessed the effect of landscape complexity, measured as proportion of arable land (PAL), on the abundance of aphids, parasitoids, and specialist and generalist predators. In addition we set up cage experiments to test the ability of these groups of enem
Soil salinization is a growing threat to global agriculture and carbon (C) sequestration, but to date it remains unclear how microbial processes will respond. We studied the acute response to salt exposure of a range of anabolic and catabolic microbial processes, including bacterial (leucine incorporation) and fungal (acetate incorporation into ergosterol) growth rates, respiration and gross N min
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
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
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are known to alter the fitness of individual organisms via changes in growth, behavior, and reproduction. It is largely unknown, however, whether these effects cascade through the food web and indirectly affect other, less sensitive organisms. The authors present results from a mesocosm experiment whereby the effects of the synthetic estrogen 17α-ethinylestradiol (EE
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
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
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
