Generalist predators such as spiders and ground beetles provide important ecosystem services by suppressing density of pest insects in agroecosystems, which offers a sustainable solution to trade-off between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. There is increasing recognition that landscape factors beyond field-plot scale are important determinants for community structure of g...

World food demand is expected to more than double by 2050. Decisions about how to meet this challenge will have profound effects on wild species and habitats. We show that farming is already the greatest extinction threat to birds (the best known taxon), and its adverse impacts look set to increase, especially in developing countries. Two competing solutions have been proposed: wildlife-friendl...

Agricultural intensification has been linked to declines in farmland and grassland bird populations in Europe and in North America. One factor thought to be behind these declines is reduced invertebrate food abundance in the breeding season, leading to reduced reproductive success. However, little is known about foraging habitat or diet of farmland birds in North America. We used stable isotope...

Infiltration which occurred in the process of runoff on farmland surface causes the increasing of soil moisture in unsaturated zone. It’s necessary to comprehend the dynamic process during farmland runoff process, analyze the coupling mechanism of water movement and solute transport among surface/subsurface zone. In this paper, a physically-based, spatially-distributed model was built for simul...

Stable isotopes are an important tool for studying invertebrate food webs and movement of invertebrates in farmland. However, stable isotope values of farmland invertebrates have been reported for only a few crop types, and rarely for other land uses within farmland. We compared 13C and 15N of invertebrates captured in corn, soybean, hay, and hedgerows in eastern Ontario, Canada. 13C was signif...

An emerging issue in wildlife conservation is the re-establishment of viable populations of endangered species in suitable habitats. Here, we studied habitat selection by a population of Hainan Eld's deer (Cervus eldi) relocated to a patchy landscape of farmland and forest. Hainan Eld's deer were pushed to the brink of extinction in the 1970s, but their population expanded rapidly from 26 to mo...

It is crucial for effective water resource management in a watershed that the relationship between land use changes and baseflow. This study quantifies the influence of land use changes on the baseflow dynamics using a hydrological model and partial least-squares (PLS) regression in the Upper Du Watershed (8961 km2), China. Our study suggests that forest can be a major factor with a negative im...

The physiological impact of agricultural pollution, habitat disturbance, and food source variability on amphibian remains poorly understood. By comparing the composition and predicted functions of gut microbiota of two frog species from forest and farmland, we quantified the effects of the exogenous environment and endogenous filters on gut microbiota and the corresponding functions. However, c...

Sanjiang Plain has undergone dramatic land degradation since the 1950s, which has caused negative effects on ecosystems services and sustainability. In this study, we used trajectory analysis as well as the Lorenz curve, Gini coefficient and relative land use suitability index (R) to analyze spatiotemporal changes of land degradation from 1954 to 2013 and to make a preliminary estimation of the...

Farmland fragmentation and farmland consolidation are two sides of the same coin paradoxically viewed as management tools. While there is a vast body literature addressing connections between on one hand agriculture production crops diversification other hand, their relationship with variations in food security still under-explored. This challenges policy makers about whether how to devise poli...