In: Biological Conservation, 2010, vol. 143, no. 6, p. 1521-1528
In annual crops, where disturbance intensities are generally high, numerous investigations demonstrated beneficial effects of organic and other extensive farming practices on biodiversity. It is however unclear if organic farming has the same beneficial effect in perennial crops (e.g. vineyards) because of a generally reduced background disturbance level. Moreover, the impact of farming practices...
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In: Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 2010, p. -
Spiders (Araneae) are an important group of generalist predators in arable land. In temperate climates, spiders recolonise cropland annually from the surrounding landscape. In arid climates however, irrigated crops and the surrounding landscape matrix offer sharply different habitat conditions and this might negatively affect spider migration into crops. We studied whether the spider fauna in...
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In: Basic and Applied Ecology, 2009, vol. 10, no. 8, p. 754-762
Across large spatial scales, species richness in many taxa is mainly determined by climatic variables. However, some of the mechanisms behind large-scale patterns of species richness and abundance are expected to act on the community level, and on a smaller scale than the resolution of the data commonly used for deriving these patterns. We studied the distribution of sheetweb spiders (Araneae:...
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In: Ecological Entomology, 2009, vol. 34, no. 6, p. 748 - 754
1. Species richness is influenced by local habitat features and large-scale climatic gradients. Usually, both influences are studied in isolation because of the divergent spatial scales at which they occur. Here, we compared the influence of large-scale climate and local habitat type on European ants using a continent-wide, standardised sampling programme.2. We investigated species richness and...
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In: Journal of Biogeography, 2009///doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02216.x
Aim: Geographic body size patterns of mammals and birds can be partly understood under the framework of Bergmann's rule. Climatic influences on body size of invertebrates, however, appear highly variable and lack a comparable, generally applicable theoretical framework. We derived predictions for body size–climate relationships for spiders from the literature and tested them using three...
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