Spatiotemporal dynamics of the agricultural landscape mosaic drives distribution and abundance of do

Ronan Marrec . Gae¨l Caro . Paul Miguet . Isabelle Badenhausser . Manuel Plantegenest . Aude Vialatte . Vincent Bretagnolle . Bertrand Gauffre, Landscape Ecology , 2017

Context

Agroecosystems are dynamic, with yearly changing proportions of crops. Explicit consideration of this temporal heterogeneity is required to decipher population and community patterns but remains poorly studied.

Objectives

We evaluated the impact on the activity-density of two dominant carabid species (Poecilus cupreus and Anchomenus dorsalis) of (1) local crop, current year landscape composition, and their interaction, and (2) inter-annual changes in landscape composition due to crop rotations.

Methods

Carabids were sampled using pitfall-traps in 188 fields of winter cereals and oilseed rape in three agricultural areas of western France contrasting in their spatial heterogeneity. We summarized landscape composition in the current and previous years in a multi-scale perspective, using buffers of increasing size around sampling locations.