Can organic arable and silvoarable micro-farms contribute to biodiversity conservation? A survey of wild bees community structure in the Brabant Wallon province (Belgium)

Summary

Agricultural intensification has led to the simplification and homogeneization of landscapes, threatening farm-land biodiversity and its associated ecosystem services in the process (Newbold et al. 2015; Potts et al. 2016).Several options have been put forward to mitigate these adverse impacts, including the agri-environmentalschemes (AES, particularly “sown wildflower strips”, see Geslin et al. 2017), the promotion of organic agri-culture and the increase of in-site plant diversity. The latter aspect is also expected to contribute to the sustainable intensification of production while reducing conventional agricultural inputs (pesticides, fertilizers,renting pollinators, etc.) and/or to optimize and stabilize ecosystem services in time and space (Lichtenberg etal. 2017).In this context, we examined the contribution of organic diversified micro-farms (defined here as productionsites of less than 2 hectares with high in-site plant diversity) to the conservation of wild bees in a networkof production farms located in the Brabant Wallon province of Belgium.