Benito Schöpke

• Master of Science
• PhD Student at Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research

Pesticides are known to harm non-target organisms, including non-weed vegetation and non-parasitic soil fauna. In addition to the arable fields they are applied on, pesticides and pesticide mixtures can also affect adjacent sites, including protected areas. So, we wanted to know: Do pesticides affect communities of plants, nematodes and oribatid mi...

With varying environmental conditions at the edges of habitat patches, due to and in concert with edge effects, the community composition should differ as well. This should lead to a peak in small-scale beta diversity across boundaries between habitat patches. However, a conceptual model is missing so far. We present such a model on beta diversity...

Context There is an urgent need to stop the biodiversity loss in European agricultural landscapes. These landscapes, due to their fragmentation, include a lot of edges, many of them between habitats of different quality in terms of biodiversity. Objectives Here, we ask how plant species richness is distributed from the interior of protected semi-n...

Dass die Ränder von geschützten Trockenrasen neben ökologisch bewirtschafteten Äckern artenreicher sind als neben konventionellen Ackern, hat uns wenig überrascht. Dass sich dieser Unterschied allerdings über unsere gesamte Untersuchungslänge von 50 m ohne Annäherung fortsetzt, hatten wir nicht erwartet.

The structural heterogeneity of our agricultural landscapes is elementarily made up by edges, many of them between habitats of different quality. Stopping the loss of biodiversity depends on an understanding of how common land use types influence each other. Field-grassland boundaries are very widespread in Central Europe, but are not much studied,...

The current decline of ruderal plant species in the villages is often associated with the urbanization of their historically anthropogenic disturbed habitats. However, regarding the extent and speed of the processes, this is a poorly studied field, and urbanization as a complex of factors is hard to assess. We took the age of village parts in thre...

Dry semi-natural grasslands are highly species-rich, and therefore often protected in cultural landscapes of Central Europe. However, reserves are typically small and may be subjected to edge effects. Here, we ask how grassland biodiversity changes from edges neighbouring arable fields into grassland interior. We compared plant diversity of protect...

Forest-grassland transition zones can support the needs of diverse plant species and produce forage for dairy and meat production. The edge effect hypothesis suggests that plant diversity is typically higher at the forest edge and decreases into the field, but grassland forage yields are lowest close to forest edge. Understanding plant diversity-fo...

Dry semi-natural grasslands are highly diverse and therefore often protected. However, reserves are typically small and may be subjected to edge effects. For grasslands neighbouring arable fields, we aska) if edge effects on grassland biodiversity extend to the grassland interior, and b) if grasslands next to organic fields are less affected. We co...

The effects of habitat fragmentation and isolation on plant species richness have been verified for a wide range of anthropogenically fragmented habitats, but there is currently little information about their effects in naturally small and isolated habitats. We tested whether habitat area, heterogeneity, and isolation affect the richness of wetland...