Biology subjects

Mupepele, A.-C.

Publications and source records attributed to Mupepele, A.-C..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Ground-nesting bee survival after soil translocation and disturbance

Ground-nesting wild bees require suitable soil conditions for their below-ground development and overwintering life stages. Understanding how soil translocation and disturbance affect individuals and the following generations of bees is important for identifying conservation measures for ground-nesting wild bees. We investigated the effects of soil translocation and disturbance on the ground-nesting solitary spring mining bee Colletes cunicularius. In a replicated controlled design, we compared the effects of soil translocation with different degrees of disturbance on the number of surviving bees and the emergence time. We found that soil translocation and disturbance reduced bee survival but did not result in complete mortality, with some individuals surviving even under severe soil disturbance. There was no evidence that soil disturbance affected the timing of spring emergence, suggesting that disturbance is unlikely to alter the timing of nest construction and, consequently, the production of the next generation. Our results indicate that translocating soil containing overwintering bees could be a promising conservation measure to compensate for habitat loss caused by land conversion.

zoology↗

bioRxiv2026

Annual ploughing turns wildflower plantings into ecological traps for ground-nesting wild bees

Wildflower plantings are an important conservation measure for supporting wild bee diversity. They aim to enhance floral resources for nutrition, but do not explicitly consider that bees also require suitable nesting and overwintering resources. Wildflower plantings may provide nesting habitat for ground-nesting bees, but the effects of soil management, e.g. ploughing, on ground-nesting bees are hardly known. To study how ploughing and age of wildflower plantings affect ground-nesting bees, we sampled bees on ploughed and unploughed wildflower plantings aged 0-4 years. We used emergence traps to sample bees directly after emergence from the ground, allowing inference on nest numbers. We found that ploughing and wildflower planting age negatively affected overwintering bee nest numbers. Nesting peaked in the year of wildflower planting establishment and declined thereafter, indicating lower habitat suitability at later successional stages. Annual ploughing caused the greatest reduction in nest numbers (-72 %), providing evidence for an ecological trap.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Reducing ploughing promotes ground-nesting flying insects

Many flying insects, such as bees, wasps, and hoverflies, live aboveground, but depend on soil for nesting, development, and overwintering. In agricultural landscapes, soil is managed for production and therefore frequently subjected to disturbances such as ploughing. The impacts of ploughing on flying insects that spend part of their life cycle belowground remain largely unknown. To investigate the effects of ploughing on ground-nesting flying insects, we conducted a two-year field experiment in flower strips subjected to different treatments, ranging from annual ploughing to four years without ploughing. Insects emerging from the soil were sampled using emergence traps, allowing a direct assessment of their response to ploughing at different frequencies. For each treatment, we measured insect biomass, abundance, and body size. We found that ploughing substantially reduced flying insect biomass. When sites were left unploughed, biomass increased rapidly, particularly during the first years of recovery. However, regardless of the time since the last disturbance, ploughing always reduced insect biomass to similarly low levels, driven primarily by declines in the abundance of large insects. Our findings highlight that even moderate reductions in ploughing frequency, for example, only every second year, can benefit ground-nesting flying insects and point to the potential for incorporating reduced ploughing frequencies into agricultural management and agri-environmental schemes.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Plant-pollinator interactions in apple orchards from a production and conservation perspective

In an agricultural landscape, production and conservation ideally go hand in hand. In a win-win scenario, conservation measures provide support for biodiversity and crop production, mediated by pollination for example. Hedges and flower strips are conservation measures that support pollinating insects, such as wild bees and hoverflies. They can be beneficial for crop pollination, but also harmful by dragging away pollinators from crops if flowering simultaneously. Here, we studied plant-pollinator interactions from two different perspectives. First we look at the apple-flower/production perspective investigating whether plant-pollinator networks in apple orchards differ with adjacent flower strips and hedges compared to isolated orchards. With help of the Bayes factor, we investigated similarity and conclude that there are no differences between pollination networks with or without adjacent flower strips and hedges. Second, we look at the pollinator/conservation perspective and analyse the impact of hedges and flower strips on pollinators and their interactions with plants before and after the apple bloom in April. We show that apple pollinators use more flower resources in flower strips and hedges across the whole season compared to isolated orchards. In orchards with flower strips and hedges interactions are more constant over time. We conclude that flower strips and hedges are beneficial for conservation of apple pollinators without being harmful for apple flower pollination being crucial for production.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Reducing publication delay to improve the efficiency and impact of conservation science

Evidence-based decision making is most effective with comprehensive access to scientific studies. If studies face delays or barriers to being published, the useful information they contain may not reach decision-makers in a timely manner. This represents a potential problem for mission-oriented disciplines where access to the latest data is paramount to ensure effective actions are deployed. We sought to analyse the severity of publication delay in conservation science -- a field that requires urgent action to prevent the loss of biodiversity. We used the Conservation Evidence database to assess the length of publication delay (time from finishing data collection to publication) in the literature that tests the effectiveness of conservation interventions. From 7,415 peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed studies of conservation interventions published over eleven decades, we find that the mean publication delay (time from completing data collection to publication) was 3.6 years and varied by conservation subject -- a smaller delay was observed for studies focussed on the management of captive animals. Publication delay was significantly smaller for studies in the non-journal literature (typically non-peer-reviewed) compared to studies published in scientific journals. Although we found publication delay has marginally increased over time (1912-2020), this change was weak post-1980s. Publication delay also varied inconsistently between studies on species with different IUCN Red List statuses and there was little evidence that studies on more threatened species were subject to a smaller delay. We discuss the possible drivers of publication delay and present suggestions for scientists, funders, publishers, and practitioners to reduce the time taken to publish studies. Although our recommendations are aimed at conservation science, they are highly relevant to other mission-driven disciplines where the rapid dissemination of scientific findings is important.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2020

European agroforestry is no universal remedy for biodiversity: a time-cumulative meta-analysis

BackgroundAgroforestry is a production system combining trees with crops or livestock. It has the potential to increase biodiversity in relation to single-use systems, such as pastures or conventional agriculture, by providing a higher habitat heterogeneity. In a literature review and subsequent meta-analysis, we investigated the relationship between biodiversity and agroforestry and critically appraise the underlying evidence of the results. ResultsBiodiversity in agroforestry was higher than in conventional agriculture, but could not outcompete pastures, forests and abandoned agroforestry systems. There was no overall biodiversity benefit in agroforestry systems. Data were available for plants, birds, bats and arthropods. Arthropods and birds were the two taxonomic groups profiting from agroforestry systems. A time-cumulative meta-analysis shows that there was no general benefit of biodiversity at any point in the past besides in early 2015. Time-cumulative meta-analysis can unravel missing robustness of meta-analytical results if conclusions alternate between significant to non-significant summary effect sizes over time. ConclusionAgroforestry increases biodiversity only in silvoarable systems compared with conventional agriculture. But even this result is based on a small magnitude and single-study effect sizes were heterogeneous with sometimes opposing conclusions. The latter suggests the importance of other usually unmeasured variables, such as landscape parameters or land-use history, influencing biodiversity in agroforestry systems.

ecology↗