Ben A. Woodcock

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology | CEH · Biodiversity

Pollination management for highbush blueberry crops (Vaccinium spp.) generally depends on beehives stocked at variable densities, with little consideration given to optimal pollination levels dictated by the mating system of the crop. This approach limits our capability to accurately forecast the consequences of animal pollination on crop productiv...

Aims: We introduce ReSurveyEurope — a new data source of resurveyed vegetation plots in Europe, compiled by a collaborative network of vegetation scientists. We describe the scope of this initiative, provide an overview of currently available data, governance, data contribution rules, and accessibility. In addition, we outline further steps, includ...

Agricultural intensification not only increases food production but also drives widespread biodiversity decline. Increasing landscape heterogeneity has been suggested to increase biodiversity across habitats, while increasing crop heterogeneity may support biodiversity within agroecosystems. These spatial heterogeneity effects can be partitioned in...

The diversity-productivity relationship predicts a positive effect of plant species richness on primary productivity. One key mechanism predicted to underlie this relationship is the effect of plant diversity on the suppression of plant antagonists, including invertebrate herbivores, plant diseases, antagonistic plants in an agricultural context (i...

Pollination services are affected by landscape context, farming management and pollinator community structure, all of which impact flower visitation rates, pollen deposition and final production. We studied these processes in Argentina for highbush blueberry crops, which depend on pollinators to produce marketable yields. We studied how land cover...

Pollination services are affected by landscape context, farming management and pollinator community structure, all of which impact flower visitation rates, pollen deposition and final production. We studied these processes in Argentina for highbush blueberry crops, which depend on pollinators to produce marketable yields. We studied how land cover...

Pollination is a fundamental ecosystem service. Predictive and mechanistic models linking pollinator community structure to pollination services increasingly incorporate information on unique functional differences among species, so called effects traits. There is little consensus as to which traits are most important in supporting pollination serv...

Ecological intensification has been embraced with great interest by the academic sector but is still rarely taken up by farmers because monitoring the state of different ecological functions is not straightforward. Modelling tools can represent a more accessible alternative of measuring ecological functions, which could help promote their use among...

Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species' ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, especially across different biomes. We compiled a worldwide collection of long-term permanent vegetati...

Modern agriculture has drastically changed global landscapes and introduced pressures on wildlife populations. Policy and management of agricultural systems has changed over the last 30 years, a period characterized not only by intensive agricultural practices but also by an increasing push towards sustainability. It is crucial that we understand t...

Over the last three decades there has been an unprecedented increase in both the coverage of wireless communication networks and the resultant radiofrequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) exposure level. There is growing concern that this rapid environmental change may have unexpected consequences for living organisms. Existing research on plants...

Meta-analyses have brought a significant improvement in our understanding of global biodiversity change. However, in ecology the static nature of current approaches, both in terms of the data included and the predictions presented, make meta-analyses difficult for policymakers to fully interrogate and adopt. Here we introduce Dynameta, a living-rev...

Trophic rewilding that reintroduces large animals into landscapes to re-establish food web interactions and restore biodiverse ecosystems has gained widespread attention. Despite this attention, few empirical studies have assessed the effectiveness of trophic rewilding for promoting biodiversity and its wider ecological benefits. Here we tested if...

While wild pollinators play a key role in global food production, their assessment is currently missing from the most commonly used environmental impact assessment method, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This is mainly due to constraints in data availability and compatibility with LCA inventories. To target this gap, relative pollinator abundance esti...

Although intended to control pests, pesticides affect a phylogenetically diverse range of non-target species contributing to global biodiversity declines 1–7 . However, the magnitude of this risk is only partly understood. Here, we show that pesticides negatively affect non-target organisms across the tree of life. We analyzed 26,096 effect sizes f...

Identifying large-scale patterns of variation in pollinator dependence (PD) in crops is important from both basic and applied perspectives. Evidence from wild plants indicates that this variation can be structured latitudinally. Individuals from populations at high latitudes may be more selfed and less dependent on pollinators due to higher environ...

While abiotic drivers of yields represent important limiting factors to crop productivity, the role of biotic drivers that could be directly managed by farmers (e.g. agri‐environment schemes supporting key ecosystem services) remains poorly understood. Precision yield mapping provides an opportunity to understand the factors that limit agricultural...

We use a national citizen science monitoring scheme to quantify how agricultural intensification affects honeybee diet breadth (number of plant species). To do this we used DNA metabarcoding to identify the plants present in 527 honey samples collected in 2019 across Great Britain. The species richness of forage plants was negatively correlated wit...

Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species’ ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, specially across different ecosystems. To address this, we compiled a global collection of long-term p...

Analysing temporal patterns in plant communities is extremely important to quantify the extent and the consequences of ecological changes, especially considering the current biodiversity crisis. Long‐term data collected through the regular sampling of permanent plots represent the most accurate resource to study ecological succession, analyse the s...

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop y...

Ecological restoration has a paradigm of re‐establishing ‘indigenous reference' communities. One resulting concern is that focussing on target communities may not necessarily create systems which function at a high level or are resilient in the face of ongoing global change. Ecological complexity – defined here, based on theory, as the number of co...

Agri-environmental management has been promoted as an approach to enhance delivery of multiple ecosystem services. Most agri-environment agreements include several actions that the farmer agrees to put in place. But, most studies have only considered how individual agri-environmental actions affect particular ecosystem services. Thus, there is litt...

Analysing temporal patterns in plant communities is extremely important to quantify the extent and the consequences of ecological changes, especially considering the current biodiversity crisis. Long-term data collected through the regular sampling of permanent plots represent the most accurate resource to study ecological succession, analyse the s...

The importance of wild bees for crop pollination is well established, but less is known about which species contribute to service delivery to inform agricultural management, monitoring and conservation. Using sites in Great Britain as a case study, we use a novel qualitative approach combining ecological information and field survey data to establi...

Declines in invertebrate biodiversity¹,² pose a significant threat to key ecosystem services.3, 4, 5 Current analyses of biodiversity often focus on taxonomic diversity (e.g., species richness),⁶,⁷ which does not account for the functional role of a species. Functional diversity of species’ morphological or behavioral traits is likely more relevant...

Sustainable intensification will require the development of new management systems to support global food demands, whilst conserving the integrity of ecosystem functions. Here, we test and identify management strategies to maintain or enhance agricultural production in grasslands whilst simultaneously supporting the provision of multiple ecosystem...

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Increased farming intensity led to massive declines across multiple farmland taxa. In Europe, measures introduced to counteract these losses include those considered agronomically productive, such as organic farming, as well as those that support no direct production of crops, such as non‐crop flowering fields in conventional farming systems. We st...

In Europe, extensively managed grasslands have undergone large-scale declines due to intensive agriculture and abandonment. Their restoration supports arthropod biodiversity within farming systems. We investigated limiting factors for arthropod establishment during grassland restoration across a chronosequence of 52 restoration sites established by...

Worldwide honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) are one of the most widely kept domesticated animals, supporting domestic and commercial livelihoods though the production of honey and wax, as well as in the delivery of pollination services to crops. Quantifying which plant species are foraged upon by honeybees provides insights into their nutritional statu...

Risks posed to bees from neonicotinoid seed treatments (clothianidin, thiamethoxam, imidacloprid) led in 2013 to the European Union instigating a moratorium for their use on mass-flowering crops, including oilseed rape in the UK. This restriction did allow for the continued use of these seed treatments, in particular clothianidin, on non-flowering...

Questions Compensatory dynamics are described as one of the main mechanisms that increase community stability, e.g. where decreases of some species on a year‐to‐year basis are offset by an increase in others. Deviations from perfect synchrony between species (asynchrony) have therefore been advocated as an important mechanism underlying biodiversit...

Biological pest control has become one of the central principles of ecological intensification in agriculture. However, invertebrate natural enemies within agricultural ecosystems are exposed to a myriad of different pesticides at both lethal and sub‐lethal doses, that may limit their capacity to carry out pest control. An important question is how...

The stability of ecological communities is critical for the stable provisioning of ecosystem services, such as food and forage production, carbon sequestration, and soil fertility. Greater biodiversity is expected to enhance stability across years by decreasing synchrony among species, but the drivers of stability in nature remain poorly resolved....

The stability of ecological communities is critical for the stable provisioning of ecosystem services, such as food and forage production, carbon sequestration, and soil fertility. Greater biodiversity is expected to enhance stability across years by decreasing synchrony among species, but the drivers of stability in nature remain poorly resolved....

Insecticides represent an important management tool in agriculture. They provide a low cost and efficacious approach to pest control, where they may be employed both reactively and pre-emptively. It is likely insecticides will continue to play a role in meeting the challenge of feeding a growing global population. The widespread use of insecticides...

Sustainable agriculture aims to produce sufficient food while minimizing environmental damage. To achieve this, we need to understand the role of agricultural landscapes in providing diverse ecosystem services and how these affect crop production and resilience, that is, maintaining yields despite environmental perturbation. We used 10 years of Eng...

Insects provide vital ecosystem services to agricultural systems in the form of pollination and natural pest control. However, there are currently widespread declines in the beneficial insects which deliver these services (i.e. pollinators and ‘natural enemies’ such as predators and parasitoids). Two key drivers of these declines have been the expa...

EKLIPSE received a request by Pollinis on the 30th of June 2018, to produce an overview of the current knowledge and research gaps related to the impacts of pesticide and fertilizer use in farmland on the effectiveness of adjacent pollinator conservation measures. The call was answered through a Joint Fact Finding approach, including a workshop on...

Climate change poses a threat to global food security with extreme heat events causing drought and direct damage to crop plants. However, by altering behavioural or physiological responses of insects, extreme heat events may also affect pollination services on whichmany crops are dependent. Such effectsmay potentially be exacerbated by other enviro...

ContextMaximising insect pollination of mass-flowering crops is a widely-discussed approach to sustainable agriculture. Management actions can target landscape-scale semi-natural habitat, cropping patterns or field-scale features, but little is known about their relative effectiveness.Objective To test how landscape composition (area of mass-flower...

Agricultural pesticides are a key component of the toolbox of most agricultural systems and are likely to continue to play a role in meeting the challenge of feeding a growing global population. However, pesticide use has well documented and often significant consequences for populations of native wildlife. Although rigorous, regulatory processes f...

How insects promote crop pollination remains poorly understood in terms of the contribution of functional trait differences between species. We used meta-analyses to test for correlations between community abundance, species richness and functional trait metrics with oilseed rape yield, a globally important crop. While overall abundance is consiste...

Under extreme dry weather conditions the cell grazing system allows pasture to recover from defoliation, maintaining herbage mass at desirable levels and preventing removal of animals from pasture.

Pollination is a critical ecosystem service underpinning the productivity of agricultural systems across the world. Wild insect populations provide a substantial contribution to the productivity of many crops and seed set of wild flowers. However, large-scale evidence on species-specific trends among wild pollinators are lacking. Here we show subst...

Sentinel prey (an artificially manipulated patch of prey) are widely used to assess the level of predation provided by natural enemies in agricultural systems. Whilst a number of different methodologies are currently in use, little is known about how arthropod predators respond to artificially manipulated sentinel prey in comparison with predation...

Journal: Agro Sur (Chile)

Understanding spatial variation in the structure and stability of plant–pollinator networks, and their relationship with anthropogenic drivers, is key for maintaining pollination services and mitigating declines. Constructing sufficient networks to examine patterns over large spatial scales remains challenging. Using biological records (citizen sci...

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...