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The impact of uncut strips on the hay meadows to spider communities
Rothová, Helena ; Šípek, Petr (advisor) ; Hula, Vladimír (referee)
Until recently, the importance of grasslands in supporting biodiversity in Central Europe has been overlooked. It is only recently that the view that attention needs to be paid to this topic has become more prevalent. Grassland habitats are the most biodiverse places and many organisms have adapted to their traditional management. The post-war intensification of agriculture, associated with the intensive use of fertilizers, pesticides, large-scale mowing and the general homogenisation of production communities, has had a negative impact on overall biodiversity. The main causes of arthropod mortality include use of chemicals, mechanical destruction, resource and habitat loss. The European Union has therefore introduced a set of so-called agri-environmental-climatic measures (AEKO) to promote biodiversity in agroecosystems. Unfortunately, the partly erroneous and overly technocratic conditions of these measures have often caused them to be ineffective or even counterproductive. There is also a lack of knowledge about the impact of the measures on local communities. At the instigation of the Agency for Nature Conservation of the Czech Republic (AOPK ČR) and the company Envipor s.r.o., we tested the effect of unmown strips on different arthropod groups on 22 production meadows in the vicinity of the...
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The efect of uncut grass strips on the functional diversity of selected meadow insects communities
Kapr, Jan ; Šípek, Petr (advisor) ; Harabiš, Filip (referee)
This thesis compares the species diversity and the functional diversity of three ecologically important insect taxa (Orthoptera, Heteroptera and Hymenoptera:Aculeata) between production meadows, where the uncut grass strips are left and the meadows mown in the conventional way. Leaving the uncut strips of vegetation is an example of the agri-environmental schemes which were introduced to try to mitigate the negative impact of intensive agriculture on the biodiversity of the production grassland. Here I present part of the results of a four-year study focused on the response of insect abundance and diversity to the meadow management. Based on the recorded insect species diversity, the ecological traits of the insect species were analysed. The functional diversity analysis helps to better understand the ecological relationships in production meadow communities and to evaluate the importance of this agri-environmental scheme for various insect taxonomical and functional groups. Key words: uncut grass strips, agro-envi schemes, functional diversity, production meadows, insect decline
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