Impact of farm size and topography on plant and insect diversity of managed grasslands in the Alps

By L. Marini, Paolo Fontana, S. Klimek, A. Battisti, Kevin J. Gaston. 2009

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the second half of the 20th century, the intensification of land-use practices and the associated decline in semi-natural habitats have been the major drivers of farmland biodiversity loss. In many marginal agricultural systems, a structural transformation of farms, from small and traditional to large and intensive, has also been observed. We unravelled the impact of farm size and slope on plant, orthopteran and butterfly diversity in 132 hay meadows in a region of the Italian Alps. We defined three farm size classes representing different levels of intensification and used mixed models to test the influence of farm size along with topographic slope. The diversity of plants, orthopterans and butterflies declined with management intensity at the field scale, which mainly depended on farm size and grassland topography. We found a positive effect of slope and a negative influence of farm size on species richness of the three taxonomic groups. Large farms were strongly associated with higher production of organic fertilizers and higher soil fertility than small traditional farms, irrespective of meadow slope. At the regional scale, we found that large farms managed flatter meadows (slope = 9.0) than small traditional farms (slope = 13.5), contributing to the abandonment of steep species-rich grassland areas. Regional stakeholders should consider targeted conservation schemes to prevent the ongoing substitution of small farms with large intensive farms. A complementary solution could be to target future conservation measures to support farms with low production of organic fertilizers and to reward the maintenance of the current management of steep meadows.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c03948fcba3e6fd7bb6c91a7348a0b73b028e0e1

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Citations in the corpus

Typology and distribution of small farms in Europe: Towards a better picture (2018, background): “Small farms also support high levels of biodiversity and promote ecological resilience due to their inherent heterogeneity and diversity (Marini et al., 2009; Babai et al., 2015; Konvicka et al., 2016).”
Beta diversity of plants, birds and butterflies is closely associated with climate and habitat structure (2017, unknown): “This leads to preserved habitats for many habitat-specialist butterfly species in landscapes on steep slopes, thus causing community differences due to nestedness, a finding that is further supported by species richness patterns (Marini et al., 2009; Zellweger et al., 2016).”
System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) v. 2.1.4 (2015, background): “A similar approach was carried out by Marini et al. (2009) with the focus on the impact of farm size and terrain attributes on insect and plant diversity of managed grasslands in the Alps.”
Agricultural management, vegetation traits and landscape drive orthopteran and butterfly diversity in a grassland–forest mosaic: a multi‐scale approach (2009, background): “…lorenzo.marini@unipd.it 2009 The Authors Journal compilation 2009 The Royal Entomological Society 213 areas, characterisedby forest-dominated landscapes, recent changes in land use have also caused strong declines in insect diversity (Knop et al., 2006; Steck et al., 2007; Marini et al., 2009).”
Environmental predictors of species richness in forest landscapes: abiotic factors versus vegetation structure (2016, unknown): “Indeed, the importance of vegetation structure for critical habitat components such as shelter or sites for roosting and mate location has been highlighted earlier (Dover et al., 1997; Dennis, 2004; Marini et al., 2009a), and it is clearly confirmed by our results.”