Bea Maas

• Dr.
• PostDoc Position at University of Vienna

The COVID-19 pandemic poses major challenges for all sectors of society, including scientists faced with abrupt disruptions and redirections of research and higher education. The consequences of this crisis will disproportionately impact early-career scientists; especially those from communities historically under-represented, disadvantaged and/or...

Despite increased focus on the importance of navigating the spaces between research and implementation, conservation science is still not put into practice as often as it could be. Disciplinary and geographical biases, as well as insufficient funding or recognition of interdisciplinary communication, limit engagement between scientists, practitione...

Understanding distribution patterns and multitrophic interactions is critical for managing bat- and bird-mediated ecosystem services such as the suppression of pest and non-pest arthropods. Despite the ecological and economic importance of bats and birds in tropical forests, agroforestry systems, and agricultural systems mixed with natural forest,...

Avian ecosystem services such as the suppression of pests are considered to be of high ecological and economic importance in a range of ecosystems, especially in tropical agroforestry. However, how bird predation success is related to the diversity and composition of the bird community, as well as local and landscape factors, is poorly understood....

Human welfare is significantly linked to ecosystem services such as the suppression of pest insects by birds and bats. However, effects of biocontrol services on tropical cash crop yield are still largely unknown. For the first time, we manipulated the access of birds and bats in an exclosure experiment (day, night and full exclosures compared to o...

Agricultural expansion and intensification are major drivers of biodiversity loss, particularly in tropical regions. Cacao agroforestry systems can both support and benefit from high levels of biodiversity via associated pest control services from birds and bats, although their potential to do so likely depends on local management and the landscape...

La expansión e intensificación agrícola son importantes factores de pérdida de biodiversidad, sobre todo en las regiones tropicales. Los sistemas agroforestales de cacao pueden apoyar a y beneficiarse de altos niveles de biodiversidad a través de los servicios asociados de control de plagas de aves y murciélagos, aunque su potencial para hacerlo de...

Yields of tropical tree crops decline with time, often forcing smallholders to establish new deforestation‐derived plantations. Consequently, alternative strategies reconciling crop yield and biodiversity conservation are essential. Grafting is a common propagation method to boost yield in crops as cacao, but it alters tree structure potentially af...

Academic societies have a special responsibility in supporting the inclusivity of scientific communities. A survey of 224 Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation society members indicates that, while the society provides stronger support for equity and inclusion compared to workplaces, there is a need for continued promotion of diversity...

Diversity and functionality of bird communities in tropical agroforests are shaped by their surrounding landscape, particularly the extent and type of natural forest. However, most evidence comes from tropical rainforest landscapes, whereas the bearing of such trends in other forest types remains understudied. We compared functional and beta divers...

Agricultural intensification is a major threat to farmland biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. Semi-natural habitats are integral to the preservation of farmland biodiversity and ecosystem services, however, the extent in which they contribute to specific services is largely unclear. We studied predation rates of ground-dwelling predato...

Sub-Saharan Africa produces most of the Earth’s cacao. Although pests cause losses of hundreds of millions annually, the role of cacao pest suppressors remains unknown. We used an exclusion experiment to prevent access of bats and birds to cacao trees and quantified how their absence affected arthropod communities, herbivory, and crop yield. Overal...

Natural pest and weed regulation are essential for agricultural production, but the spatial distribution of natural enemies within crop fields and its drivers are mostly unknown. Using 28 datasets comprising 1204 study sites across eight Western and Central European countries, we performed a quantitative synthesis of carabid richness, activity dens...

XXX download here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1hTtNcA-Inxce XXXX The cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) is a billion-dollar crop species of which the yields are greatly constrained by, amongst others, pollination limitation. Manual pollen supplementation has been proposed to counter pollination deficits, thus improving yield quantity and potentially...

Many publications lack sufficient background information (e.g. location) to be interpreted, replicated, or reused for synthesis. This impedes scientific progress and the application of science to practice. Reporting guidelines (e.g. checklists) improve reporting standards. They have been widely taken up in the medical sciences, but not in ecologica...

Bird‐ and bat‐mediated biocontrol benefits the productivity of tropical commodity crops such as cacao, but the ecological interactions driving these ecosystem services remain poorly understood. Whereas birds and bats prey on herbivorous arthropods, they may also prey on arthropod mesopredators such as ants, with poorly understood consequences for p...

Central/West Africa is one of the most biodiverse regions on earth and one of the largest producers of cacao, producing about 68.4 % of the world's chocolate. Here, cacao pests and diseases can cause losses of $761 million annually. However, no studies from Africa have quantified the role of flying vertebrates as pest suppressors in cacao plantatio...

tStrengthening participation of Global South researchers in tropical ecology and conservation is a target ofour scientific community, but strategies for fostering increased engagement are mostly directed at GlobalNorth institutions and researchers. Whereas such approaches are crucial, there are unique challenges toaddressing diversity, equity and i...

In the tropics, combining food security with biodiversity conservation remains a major challenge. Tropical agroforestry systems are among the most biodiversity‐friendly and productive land‐use systems, and 70% of cocoa is grown by >6 million smallholder farmers living on <2$ per day. In cacao's main centre of diversification, the western Amazon reg...

Building more sustainable, equitable, and resilient food systems means rethinking how we consume, produce, and safeguard agrobiodiversity that can benefit the planet and secure access to nutritious food for all. This was the purpose of the 2021 Second International Agrobiodiversity Congress, convening scientists, Indigenous Peoples, entrepreneurs,...

Lack of diversity in editorial boards hinders multifaceted perspectives in fields such as ecology, evolution, and conservation. We outline ten key actions for editorial boards to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion, benefiting the journal in attracting a wider readership, enhancing diversity among authors, and overcoming biases in editorial de...

Animals provide services such as pollination and pest control in cacao agro-forestry systems, but also disservices. Yet, their combined contributions to crop yield and fruit loss are mostly unclear. In a full-factorial field experiment in northwestern Peru, we excluded flying insects, ants, birds and bats from cacao trees and assessed several produ...

To counteract ongoing biodiversity declines, many European countries have implemented agri-environment schemes (AES) such as ecological focus areas (EFAs), the efficiency of which is often questioned due to low levels of habitat quality. We established new grasslands (NG) using a more diverse seed mixture specifically adapted to mimic low-intensity...

Pollination services of cacao are crucial for global chocolate production, yet remain critically understudied, particularly in regions of origin of the species. Notably, uncertainties remain concerning the identity of cacao pollinators, the influence of landscape (forest distance) and management (shade cover) on flower visitation and the role of po...

Agricultural expansion and intensification increasingly threaten birds and bats, especially insectivorous species from the tropics. Cacao agroforests in tropical rainforest areas have been shown to support higher bird and bat biodiversity than other land-use systems, but their suitability for tropical dry forest biodiversity remains unclear. We pre...

Establishment of semi‐natural grasslands offers a valuable approach to the conservation of threatened grassland biodiversity. We established new grassland strips on former crop fields adjacent to old semi‐natural grasslands and monitored the development of plant, carabid, spider and wild bee communities over three years. The studied plant and arthr...

Agricultural intensification is among the major threats to farmland biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. Agri-environment schemes in Europe aim to counteract the continuous decrease of permanent grassland habitat and related decline of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. We established new grasslands adjacent to permanent old grassl...

The human aspect of conservation and restoration is implicit and widely considered in the literature. However, human traits are rarely if ever incorporated into models to explain actual quantitative measures of success or failure. A paper by Sher et al. recently published in a special issue of Wetlands filled this gap by exploring the impact of the...

Across a wide range of disciplines, mounting evidence points to solutions for addressing the global biodiversity and climate crisis through sustainable land use development. Managing ecosystem services offers promising potential of combining environmental, economic, and social interests in this process. Achieving sustainability, however, requires c...

• Ongoing intensification and fragmentation of European agricultural landscapes dramatically reduce biodiversity and associated functions. Enhancing perennial noncrop areas holds great potential to support ecosystem services such as ant-mediated pest control. • To study the potential of newly established grassland strips to enhance ant diversity an...

Agricultural biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions are declining at alarming rates due to widespread land use intensification. They can only be maintained through targeted landscape management that supports species with different habitat preferences, dispersal capacities and other functional traits that determine their survival. However,...

Biodiversity-friendly management is pivotal for sustainable agriculture, but rarely put into practice by farmers despite mounting evidence of the social, environmental, and economic benefits of such practices. We investigated the reasons for this implementation challenge by conducting a transdisciplinary survey to identify differences between perce...

Biodiversity-friendly management is pivotal for sustainable agriculture, but rarely put into practice by farmers despite mounting evidence of the social, environmental, and economic benefits of such practices. We investigated the reasons for this implementation challenge by conducting a transdisciplinary survey to identify differences between perce...

The global scientific community has become increasingly diverse over recent decades, but is this ongoing development also reflected among top‐publishing authors and potential scientific leaders? We surveyed 13 leading journals in ecology, evolution, and conservation to investigate the diversity of the 100 top‐publishing authors in each journal betw...

Growing demand for tropical commodities that are socially and environmentally more sustainable is changing the global market for agroforestry products such as coffee and cocoa. Transforming mass production of cash crops towards higher socio-ecological standards includes challenges, but also novel opportunities to protect ecosystem services and hum...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield–related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield–related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance...

Experimental exclosure of birds and bats constitutes a powerful tool to study the impacts of wildlife on pests and crop yields in agricultural systems. Though widely utilized, exclosure experiments are not standardized across studies. Indeed, key differences surrounding the design, materials, and protocols for implementing field-based exclosure exp...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by few abundant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 crop systems, we partition the relative importance of abundance and s...

Significance Decades of research have fostered the now-prevalent assumption that noncrop habitat facilitates better pest suppression by providing shelter and food resources to the predators and parasitoids of crop pests. Based on our analysis of the largest pest-control database of its kind, noncrop habitat surrounding farm fields does affect multi...

The idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a win–win opportunity to conserve biodiversity and bolster yields has emerged as an agroecological paradigm. However, while noncrop habitat in landscapes surrounding farms sometimes benefits pest predators, natural enemy responses remain heterogeneous across studies and effects on p...

Although there is a diversity of concerns about recent persistent declines in the abundances of many species, the implications for the associated delivery of ecosystem services to people are surprisingly poorly understood. In principle, there are a broad range of potential functional relationships between the abundance of a species or group of spec...

This book is based on close and multi-year communication between ecologists and local cacao farmers and can therefore serve as a valuable tool to build a bridge of communications between farmers and scientists about ecosystems, biodiversity and land use strategies. As described in the book, birds and bats can make an economically beneficial contrib...

Both, agricultural intensification and abandonment caused a strong decline in plant species richness in semi-natural grasslands in Central Europe within the last decades. At a global scale, the Convention on Biological Diversity targeted at halting the decline of biodiversity by the end of 2010. Agri-environmental schemes (AES) have been developed...

Biological Conservation recently rejected a paper because we regarded the killing of thousands of vertebrates in a protected area as unnecessary and inappropriate. The authors had the required approvals from the conservation authorities for this work and argued that alternative non-harmful methods, such as camera-traps and baited video, or capture-...

Large and isolated trees are often last refuges for rare forest species in highly fragmented and human-dominated landscapes. This is of particular importance in tropical forest margin areas where remnant forest trees are being cleared at an alarming rate. Drivers and consequences of such remnant forest tree losses are still poorly documented. Here...

Tropical agroforests are diverse systems where several predator groups shape animal communities and plant–arthropod interactions. Ants, birds and bats in particular can reduce herbivore numbers and thereby increase crop yield. However, the relative importance of these groups, whether they interact, and how this interaction is affected by management...

Intensification in land-use and farming practices has had largely negative effects on bats, leading to population declines and concomitant losses of ecosystem services. Current trends in land-use change suggest that agricultural areas will further expand, while production systems may either experience further inten-sification (particularly in devel...

Avian ecosystem services such as the suppression of pests are considered being of high ecological and economic importance in a range of ecosystems, especially in tropical agroforestry. But how bird predation success is related to the diversity and composition of the bird community, as well as local and landscape factors, is poorly understood. The a...

Studies on temporal changes of tropical bird communities in response to habitat modification are rare. We quantified changes in bird assemblages at the rainforest margin of Lore Lindu National Park, Central Sulawesi, over an interval of 6 years. Standardized bird counts were conducted in the years 2001/2002 and 2008 at 15 census points representing...