Dataset Information

Bee species diversity enhances productivity and stability in a perennial crop.

ABSTRACT: Wild bees provide important pollination services to agroecoystems, but the mechanisms which underlie their contribution to ecosystem functioning--and, therefore, their importance in maintaining and enhancing these services-remain unclear. We evaluated several mechanisms through which wild bees contribute to crop productivity, the stability of pollinator visitation, and the efficiency of individual pollinators in a highly bee-pollination dependent plant, highbush blueberry. We surveyed the bee community (through transect sampling and pan trapping) and measured pollination of both open- and singly-visited flowers. We found that the abundance of managed honey bees, Apis mellifera, and wild-bee richness were equally important in describing resulting open pollination. Wild-bee richness was a better predictor of pollination than wild-bee abundance. We also found evidence suggesting pollinator visitation (and subsequent pollination) are stabilized through the differential response of bee taxa to weather (i.e., response diversity). Variation in the individual visit efficiency of A. mellifera and the southeastern blueberry bee, Habropoda laboriosa, a wild specialist, was not associated with changes in the pollinator community. Our findings add to a growing literature that diverse pollinator communities provide more stable and productive ecosystem services.

SUBMITTER: Rogers SR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4016306 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Bee species diversity enhances productivity and stability in a perennial crop.

Rogers Shelley R SR Tarpy David R DR Burrack Hannah J HJ

PloS one 20140509 5

Wild bees provide important pollination services to agroecoystems, but the mechanisms which underlie their contribution to ecosystem functioning--and, therefore, their importance in maintaining and enhancing these services-remain unclear. We evaluated several mechanisms through which wild bees contribute to crop productivity, the stability of pollinator visitation, and the efficiency of individual pollinators in a highly bee-pollination dependent plant, highbush blueberry. We surveyed the bee co ...[more]

PMID: 24817218

Similar Datasets

Project description:The diversity-productivity, diversity-invasibility, and diversity-stability hypotheses propose that increasing species diversity should lead, respectively, to increased average biomass productivity, invasion resistance, and stability. We tested these three hypotheses in the context of cover crop mixtures, evaluating the effects of increasing cover crop mixture diversity on aboveground biomass, weed suppression, and biomass stability. Twenty to forty cover crop treatments were replicated three or four times at eleven sites using eighteen species representing three cover crop species each from six pre-defined functional groups: cool-season grasses, cool-season legumes, cool-season brassicas, warm-season grasses, warm-season legumes, and warm-season broadleaves. Each species was seeded as a pure stand, and the most diverse treatment contained all eighteen species. Remaining treatments included treatments representing intermediate levels of cover crop species and functional richness and a no cover crop control. Cover crop seeding dates ranged from late July to late September with both cover crop and weed aboveground biomass being sampled prior to winterkill. Stability was assessed by evaluating the variability in cover crop biomass for each treatment across plots within each site. While increasing cover crop mixture diversity was associated with increased average aboveground biomass, we assert that this was the result of the average biomass of the pure stands being drawn down by low biomass species rather than due to niche complementarity or increased resource use efficiency. At no site did the highest biomass mixture produce more than the highest biomass pure stand. Furthermore, while increases in cover crop mixture diversity were correlated with increases in weed suppression and biomass stability, we argue that this was largely the result of diversity co-varying with aboveground biomass, and that differences in aboveground biomass rather than differences in diversity drove the differences observed in weed suppression and stability.

Project description:Cropping sequence diversification provides a systems approach to reduce yield variations and improve resilience to multiple environmental stresses. Yield advantages of more diverse crop rotations and their synergistic effects with reduced tillage are well documented, but few studies have quantified the impact of these management practices on yields and their stability when soil moisture is limiting or in excess. Using yield and weather data obtained from a 31-year long term rotation and tillage trial in Ontario, we tested whether crop rotation diversity is associated with greater yield stability when abnormal weather conditions occur. We used parametric and non-parametric approaches to quantify the impact of rotation diversity (monocrop, 2-crops, 3-crops without or with one or two legume cover crops) and tillage (conventional or reduced tillage) on yield probabilities and the benefits of crop diversity under different soil moisture and temperature scenarios. Although the magnitude of rotation benefits varied with crops, weather patterns and tillage, yield stability significantly increased when corn and soybean were integrated into more diverse rotations. Introducing small grains into short corn-soybean rotation was enough to provide substantial benefits on long-term soybean yields and their stability while the effects on corn were mostly associated with the temporal niche provided by small grains for underseeded red clover or alfalfa. Crop diversification strategies increased the probability of harnessing favorable growing conditions while decreasing the risk of crop failure. In hot and dry years, diversification of corn-soybean rotations and reduced tillage increased yield by 7% and 22% for corn and soybean respectively. Given the additional advantages associated with cropping system diversification, such a strategy provides a more comprehensive approach to lowering yield variability and improving the resilience of cropping systems to multiple environmental stresses. This could help to sustain future yield levels in challenging production environments.

Project description:Intensive agriculture has major negative impacts on ecosystem diversity and functioning, including that of soils. The associated reduction of soil biodiversity and essential soil functions, such as nutrient cycling, can restrict plant growth and crop yield. By increasing plant diversity in agricultural systems, intercropping could be a promising way to foster soil microbial diversity and functioning. However, plant-microbe interactions and the extent to which they influence crop yield under field conditions are still poorly understood. In this study, we performed an extensive intercropping experiment using eight crop species and 40 different crop mixtures to investigate how crop diversity affects soil microbial diversity and activity, and whether these changes subsequently affect crop yield. Experiments were carried out in mesocosms under natural conditions in Switzerland and in Spain, two countries with drastically different soils and climate, and our crop communities included either one, two or four species. We sampled and sequenced soil microbial DNA to assess soil microbial diversity, and measured soil basal respiration as a proxy for soil activity. Results indicate that in Switzerland, increasing crop diversity led to shifts in soil microbial community composition, and in particular to an increase of several plant-growth promoting microbes, such as members of the bacterial phylum Actinobacteria. These shifts in community composition subsequently led to a 15 and 35% increase in crop yield in 2 and 4-species mixtures, respectively. This suggests that the positive effects of crop diversity on crop productivity can partially be explained by changes in soil microbial composition. However, the effects of crop diversity on soil microbes were relatively small compared to the effects of abiotic factors such as fertilization (three times larger) or soil moisture (three times larger). Furthermore, these processes were context-dependent: in Spain, where resources were limited, soil microbial communities did not respond to crop diversity, and their effect on crop yield was less strong. This research highlights the potential beneficial role of soil microbial communities in intercropping systems, while also reflecting on the relative importance of crop diversity compared to abiotic drivers of microbiomes and emphasizing the context-dependence of crop-microbe relationships.

Dataset Information

Bee species diversity enhances productivity and stability in a perennial crop.

Publications

Bee species diversity enhances productivity and stability in a perennial crop.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets