Catrin Westphal

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• Professor
• Functional Agrobiodiversity & Agroecology at University of Göttingen

Pollinators face significant global decline due to agricultural intensification. Local conservation measures (CMs), such as an annual flower field, an organic crop field, or a perennial semi‐natural habitat (SNH), are implemented to counteract this negative trend, with variable success, as local CMs may not support ecological processes at spatially...

Proximity to natural habitat is known to enhance pollination services in agricultural landscapes, particularly in large-scale industrialised farms. However, it remains unclear whether these patterns hold in tropical smallholder farms-ecologically complex landscapes that sustain millions of the world's most food-insecure communities and depend heavi...

Aim Landscape heterogeneity is a key driver of biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and resilience. However, the complex relationships among different components of heterogeneity—compositional, configurational, vertical, and temporal—remain underexplored for large areas such as at the national scale. This study examines the associations among multi...

Agri‐environmental and climate measures (AECM) have been designed to promote biodiversity and ecosystem services but have thus far been unable to reverse the strong declines of farmland species. To enhance the environmental effectiveness of and participation in AECM, schemes are increasingly implemented cooperatively at landscape scale. Our study a...

Compared to monocultures, intercropping systems offer many agronomic benefits, including higher yield stability. In this study, we assessed whether cropping systems that are beneficial for yield stability are also beneficial for pollinator communities and whether the effect is modulated by the landscape type. Using a replicated block design in one...

To increase the effectiveness of agri‐environmental schemes, innovative approaches that focus on the landscape scale beyond individual fields and farms are widely discussed and tested. Central to these approaches is collaboration between several farmers and other actors in agricultural landscapes. The effectiveness of collaborative agri‐environment...

Calcareous grasslands are one of the most species-rich habitats in Europe but are often fragmented and highly degraded because of agricultural intensification and the abandonment of traditional livestock farming. This leads to loss of biodiversity together with the degradation of ecosystem services, such as predation. In this study, we determined h...

Context Intensive agriculture drives insect decline impacting insect-mediated ecosystem services that support production. Crop diversification shows promise in increasing crop productivity and enhancing ecosystem services, however, the impact on biodiversity conservation, particularly of pollinators, is unclear. Objectives Here, we synthesize the...

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α‐diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e., γ‐diversity), either due to reduced β‐diversity amplifying diversity loss or increased...

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e., γ-diversity), either due to reduced β-diversity amplifying diversity loss or increased...

Semi-natural grasslands result from traditional agriculture and are among the most species-rich ecosystems in Europe. These grasslands were once widespread across Europe, but due to changing agricultural practices, only small remnants have remained until present day. Large-scale efforts to preserve and restore these valuable ecosystems encompass th...

Abandoned and even active limestone quarries (excavation sites) can represent important secondary habitats for many species, including wild bees, associated with dry grasslands, which are threatened biodiversity hotspots in Europe. However, is not well understood how interactions between local habitat and landscape characteristics influence the val...

In many crops, both pollination and biocontrol determine crop yield, whereby the relative importance of the two ecosystem services can be moderated by the landscape context. However, additive and interactive effects of pollination and biocontrol in different landscape contexts are still poorly understood. We examined both ecosystem services in Sout...

Agri-environmental collaboration (AEC) has become a prominent subject to agricultural research and policy-making in the EU. Within the last decades, several initiatives have pioneered landscape-scale approaches to overcome the spatial mismatch between the local implementation of agri-environmental measures and the landscape-scale habitat requiremen...

Despite the major role that insect pollinators play in crop production, agricultural intensification drives them into decline. Various conservation measures have been developed to mitigate the negative effects of agriculture on insect pollinators. In a novel comparison of the efficacy of three conservation measures on honeybee colony growth, we mon...

Semi-natural grasslands result from traditional agriculture and are among the most species-rich ecosystems in Europe. These grasslands were once widespread across Europe, but due to changing agricultural practices, only small remnants have remained until present day. Large-scale efforts to preserve and restore these valuable ecosystems encompass th...

Agri-environment schemes (AES) have so far failed to halt the strong decline in farmland biodiversity. Landscape-scale implementation of AES through collaboration of multiple stakeholders could be a key to substantially improve their ecological effectiveness. However, it remains unclear how to determine the amount of target measures in a landscape,...

The expansion of the oil palm industry in Indonesia has improved livelihoods in rural communities, but comes at the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation. Here, we investigated ways to balance ecological and economic outcomes of oil palm cultivation. We compared a wide range of production systems, including smallholder plantations, industr...

Terrestrial animal biodiversity is increasingly being lost because of land-use change1,2. However, functional and energetic consequences aboveground and belowground and across trophic levels in megadiverse tropical ecosystems remain largely unknown. To fill this gap, we assessed changes in energy fluxes across ‘green’ aboveground (canopy arthropods...

South Africa is the World’s largest producers of macadamia nuts, with about 51,000 ha of land covered by macadamia. This leads to major farming challenges, as the expansion of orchards is associated with the loss of habitat and biodiversity, the excessive use of and resistance to insecticides, and an increased pressure on water resources. More freq...

Pollinators benefit from increasing floral resources in agricultural landscapes, which could be an underexplored co‐benefit of mass‐flowering crop cultivation. However, the impacts of mass‐flowering crops on pollinator communities are complex and appear to be context‐dependent, mediated by factors such as crop flowering time and the availability of...

Urbanization is a major driver of biodiversity change but how it interacts with spatial and temporal gradients to influence the dynamics of plant–pollinator networks is poorly understood, especially in tropical urbanization hotspots. Here, we analysed the drivers of environmental, spatial and temporal turnover of plant–pollinator interactions (inte...

Enhancing biodiversity in monoculture-dominated landscapes is a pressing restoration challenge. Planted tree islands can enhance biodiversity locally, but the role of processes at larger spatial scales is unclear. Using a multi-scale approach, we explored how these scale-dependent processes influence the diversity of seven taxa (woody plants, under...

Expanding cities increasingly encroach fertile farmlands, questioning the viability of maintaining agriculture within and around them. Yet, our knowledge on how urbanization influences pollinator communities and the provision of pollination services to crops is limited, especially for the urbanization hotspots of the Global South. Mango Mangifera i...

Climate and insect pests are vital variables that affect crop production. Climate change will alter the magnitude and timing of precipitation, but how rainfall and temperature interact to affect insect pest damage in agriculture is poorly understood. Here, we explore the interacting effects of elevation and contrasting weather conditions (a wet vs....

More sustainable and environmentally friendly agricultural practices, including ecological intensification, are needed to reduce biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. We evaluated the potential of ecological intensification through the enhancement of pollination services in an intensively managed and insect‐pollinated crop, Macadamia int...

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...

Enhancing crop diversity is an option to make agriculture more sustainable and biodiversity friendly. Intercropping grain legumes together with cereals leads to higher crop diversity and has a broad range of agronomic and ecological benefits. However, sole crop stands of grain legumes might be richer in floral resources than grain legume-cereal int...

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Abstract Fruit bats provide vital ecosystem services through seed d...

Increasing pressure on land resources necessitates landscape management strategies that simultaneously deliver multiple benefits to numerous stakeholder groups with competing interests. Accordingly, we developed an approach that combines ecological data on all types of ecosystem services with information describing the ecosystem service priorities...

Understanding whether land use intensification causes regime shifts is of key importance for management, particularly if these shifts are associated with thresholds separating different ecosystem states and with hysteretic dynamics. Here we use a unique, long-term grassland database to identify thresholds in the response of 16 ecosystem functions a...

The impact of local biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning is well established, but the role of larger-scale biodiversity dynamics in the delivery of ecosystem services remains poorly understood. Here we address this gap using a comprehensive dataset describing the supply of 16 cultural, regulating and provisioning ecosystem services in 150 Eur...

Apple is one of the most widely cultivated fruit crops world‐wide, and apple yield benefits from pollination by insects. The global decline in wild pollinator populations raises concern about the adequacy of pollination services in apple production. Here, we present a global meta‐analysis of pollination in apple. We assembled from the literature a...

Although most of the wild bee species are ground-nesting, little is known about their nesting requirements and the conservation measures to promote ground-nesting bees. Calcareous grasslands are one of the most species-rich habitats in Central Europe and therefore essential for protecting bee diversity. The management practices of calcareous grassl...

Urbanization poses a major threat to biodiversity and food security, as expanding cities, especially in the Global South, increasingly compete with natural and agricultural lands. However, the impact of urban expansion on agricultural biodiversity in tropical regions is overlooked. Here we assess how urbanization affects the functional response of...

Background Intense conversion of tropical forests into agricultural systems contributes to habitat loss and the decline of ecosystem functions. Plant-pollinator interactions buffer the process of forest fragmentation, ensuring gene flow across isolated patches of forests by pollen transfer. In this study, we identified the composition of pollen gra...

Understanding drivers and monitoring changes of biodiversity forms the basis for evidence-based management and policy recommendations that aim to reduce biodiversity loss and to ensure the delivery of ecosystem services on which we rely. Ecoacoustic monitoring can be applied across large spatial and temporal scales, offering the potential for less...

Bumblebees are important pollinators in agricultural landscapes that are facing global declines. Main pressures include food scarcity mainly due to the reduction of semi-natural habitats (SNH) and parasite-induced vulnerability. Even though intensive agricultural landscapes are poor habitats for bumblebees, the cultivation of mass-flowering crops (...

Wildlife-friendly management practices promote pollinators and pollination services in agricultural landscapes. Wild bee densities are driven by landscape composition, as they benefit from an increased availability of nesting and foraging resources at landscape scale. However, effects of landscape composition on bee foraging decisions and consequen...

In their response to our paper on harnessing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes [1], Stein-Bachinger et al. [2] argue that our statements in favour of reducing field size and crop diversification ‘have to be combined with reduced management intensity’ to be effective. While we acknowledge the role of reducing agricultural intensity for biodive...

Context Current diversity and species composition of ecological communities can often not exclusively be explained by present land use and landscape structure. Historical land use may have considerably influenced ecosystems and their properties for decades and centuries. Objectives We analysed the effects of present and historical landscape struct...

Despite a developing understanding of how landscape level processes moderate biodiversity patterns and ecosystem functioning, key questions remain unresolved, therefore limiting our ability to manage for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem functioning at the most appropriate scales. These questions have remained unanswered because studies in ag...

_________________ Full text on biorxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.17.208199v5 ___________________ Land-use intensification has contrasting effects on different ecosystem services, often leading to land-use conflicts. While multiple studies have demonstrated how landscape-scale strategies can minimise the trade-off between agr...

In their response to our paper on harnessing biodiversity-friendly landscapes [1], Brühl et al. [2] argue that we underestimate the benefits of banning synthetic pesticides in organic farming. We thank the authors for highlighting the importance of reducing pesticide applications for biodiversity conservation, an assessment that we share [3–5]. How...

The cultivation of mass-flowering crops (MFC) can promote pollinators by providing floral resources. However, there is missing knowledge about the effect of MFC cultivation history on bees and their pollination services in agricultural landscapes. We investigated how bee densities in oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.) (OSR) fields were affected by pa...

Urban areas are increasing in number and extent worldwide. Few other anthropogenic land uses alter landscapes in a more persistent fashion; however, the effects of urbansiation on biodiversity remain poorly studied. Here, we studied bird communities along the rural–urban interface of the Indian megacity Bengaluru. Birds were assessed with point cou...

Context Pollinator declines and functional homogenization of farmland insect communities have been reported. Mass-flowering crops (MFC) can support pollinators by providing floral resources. Knowledge about how MFC with dissimilar flower morphology affect functional groups and functional trait compositions of wild bee communities is scarce. Object...

We challenge the widespread appraisal that organic farming is the fundamental alternative to conventional farming for harnessing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Certification of organic production is largely restricted to banning synthetic agrochemicals, resulting in limited benefits for biodiversity but high yield losses despite ongoing i...

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...

Urbanization is a major driver of land use change and biodiversity decline. While most of the ongoing and future urbanization hotspots are located in the Global South, the impact of urban expansion on agricultural biodiversity and associated functions and services in these regions has widely been neglected. Additionally, most studies assess biodive...

Rice ecosystems vary greatly in climate, edaphic conditions, landscape heterogeneity, agricultural management and biodiversity. However, ongoing land use intensification and conversion to large-scale monoculture are threatening this diversity. We analyzed how rice-growing regions in Southeast Asia differ in diversity and composition of vascular pla...

Land-use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss. However, understanding how different components of land use drive biodiversity loss requires the investigation of multiple trophic levels across spatial scales. Using data from 150 agricultural grasslands in central Europe, we assess the influence of multiple components of local-and l...

A two page summary of the paper - this is designed for a non-acedemic audience. Pleasse feel free to disseminate. There is a QR Code for the paper itself included.

While an increasing number of studies indicate that the range, diversity and abundance of many wild pollinators has declined, the global area of pollinator-dependent crops has significantly increased over the last few decades. Crop pollination studies to date have mainly focused on either identifying different guilds pollinating various crops, or o...

Quantifying how multiple ecosystem services and functions are affected by different drivers of Global Change is challenging. Particularly in African savanna regions, highly integrated land-use activities created a landscape mosaic with flows of multiple resources between land use types. A framework is needed that quantifies the effects of climate c...

Agri-environment schemes, like flower fields, have been implemented in the EU to counteract the dramatic decline of farmland biodiversity. Farmers in Lower Saxony, Germany, may receive payments for three flower field types: annual, perennial (five years old), and mixed flower fields composed of yearly alternating annual and biannual parts. We asses...

Bees provide important pollination services for crops, but pollination limitation is a common problem in agricultural landscapes worldwide. To promote ecological intensification in fruit production, more knowledge is needed concerning the interacting effects of insect pollination services and soil fertility on crop quality and quantity. We investig...

Many farmers are facing high economic risks if pollinator declines continue or temporal and spatial variation in wild bee communities cause reduced pollination services. Co‐flowering crops might compete for pollinators, while they also might facilitate the delivery of pollination services. This rarely studied topic is of particular interest with re...

Worldwide pollinator declines lead to pollination deficits in crops and wild plants, and managed bees are frequently used to meet the increasing demand for pollination. However, their foraging can be affected by flower availability and colony size. We investigated how mass‐flowering oilseed rape (OSR) can influence the pollen resource use of small...

Concerns about insect declines are growing and the provisioning of ecosystem services like pollination may be threatened. To safeguard biodiversity, greening measures were introduced within the reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy. One measure commonly applied by farmers is the cultivation of nitrogen fixing crops. Although underlying stud...

Land-use intensification has contrasting effects on different ecosystem services, often leading to land-use conflicts. Multiple studies, especially within the ‘land-sharing versus land-sparing’ debate, have demonstrated how landscape-scale strategies can minimise the trade-off between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. However,...

Intensified agriculture increasingly threatens wild and managed bees by promoting landscape uniformity and reducing floral resource availability whereas urban areas can provide continuous floral resources within green spaces and private gardens. Mass-flowering events of crops and trees, such as lime trees (Tilia spp.), can provide ample floral reso...

The demand for crop pollination is increasing and honey bees are frequently used, in particular as wild pollinators are in decline. Temporal and spatial variation of flower resources affects foraging decisions of wild and honey bees. To optimise crop pollination management a better understanding of potential competition for pollinators in mass- and...

Bumble bees are important crop pollinators and provide important pollination services to their respective ecosystems. Their pollen diet and thus food preferences can be characterized through nucleic acid sequence analysis. We present ITS2 amplicon sequence data from pollen collected by bumble bees. The pollen was collected from six different bumble...

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...

Context Insect herbivores comprise the majority of macroinvertebrate communities of temperate grasslands and act as drivers for important ecosystem functions. Landscape- and local-level land use may alter species pools and dispersal possibilities and act as local environmental filters, affecting insect trait composition. Objectives While environme...

Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research grew rapidly following concerns that biodiversity loss would negatively affect ecosystem functions and the ecosystem services they underpin. However, despite evidence that biodiversity strongly affects ecosystem functioning, the influence of BEF research upon policy and the management of ‘real-world...

Wild bees provide important pollination services for crops and wild plants. While land use intensification has resulted in steep declines of wild bee diversity across agricultural landscapes, the creation of semi-natural habitats has been proposed as a counter-measure. However, the relative value of semi-natural and natural habitats in promoting wi...

The land‐sharing versus land‐sparing debate recently stagnated, lacking an integrating perspective in agricultural landscapes as well as consideration of ecosystem services. Here, we argue that land‐sharing (i.e. wildlife‐friendly farming systems) and land‐sparing (i.e. separation of high‐yielding agriculture and natural habitats) are not mutually...

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...

Animal pollinators are in a serious decline due to habitat loss, isolation and landscape fragmentation, putting pollination services to crops at risk. Hedgerows have been repeatedly emphasized as landscape elements that provide nesting and food resources, connect fragmented habitats and could thus facilitate crop pollination. However, the beneficia...

Forty-four percent of Europe’s terrestrial surface is covered with agricultural land. Thus, agriculture strongly influences Europe’s environment, including ecological functions and processes.

Open access at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin_Schaedler/publication/330772906_Rice_Ecosystem_Services_in_South-East_Asia_The_LEGATO_Project_Its_Approaches_and_Main_Results_with_a_Focus_on_Biocontrol_Services/links/5c5befc445851582c3d45b99/Rice-Ecosystem-Services-in-South-East-Asia-The-LEGATO-Project-Its-Approaches-and-Main-Results-with...

Rapid growth of the world's human population has increased pressure on landscapes to deliver high levels of multiple ecosystem services, including food and fibre production, carbon storage, biodiversity conservation, and recreation. However, we currently lack general principles describing how to achieve this landscape multifunctionality. We combine...

In a cross-disciplinary project (LEGATO) combining inter- and transdisciplinary methods, we quantify the dependency of rice-dominated socio-ecological systems on ecosystem functions (ESF) and the ecosystem services (ESS) the integrated system provides. In the collaboration of a large team including geo- and bioscientists, economists, political and...

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