Context Managing landscapes to increase multiple services provision in search of higher agricultural yield can be an alternative to agricultural intensification. Nonetheless, to properly guide management, we need to better understand how landscape structure affects multiple services at different scales. Objectives Focused on synergies and trade-offs in real-world landscapes, we investigated how and at which scale landscape features related to the supply, demand and flow of services act as a common driver of pollination and pest control in coffee plantations. Methods Considering landscapes in an important coffee-producing region in Brazil, we tested the effects of forest and coffee cover , distance to forest , forest-coffee edge density and coffee edge diversity at multiple scales on pollination and pest control by birds, bats and ants. Results Coffee edge diversity (number of land uses in contact with coffee) was an important driver of pollination and pest control, being consistently relevant at local scales (up to 300 m). However, services were also affected by other landscape features and the ‘scale of effect’ of these relationships varied. Additionally, results show the complex nature of pest control once the direction of effect revealed services and disservices. Conclusions Besides reinforcing the importance of known landscape effects, this study adds to previous studies by showcasing the relevance of diverse land uses around coffee crops as a common driver of pollination and pest control provision by different species. Moreover, we highlight how understanding the combined local and landscape effects may aid in offsetting disservices and tackling the variety of ‘scales of effect’ found.

Understanding the organization of mutualistic networks at multiple spatial scales is key to ensure biological conservation and functionality in human-modified ecosystems. Yet, how changing habitat and landscape features affect pollen-bee interaction networks is still poorly understood. Here, we analysed how bee-flower visitation and bee-pollen-transport interactions respond to habitat fragmentation at the local network and regional metanetwork scales, combining data from 29 fragments of calcareous grasslands, an endangered biodiversity hotspot in central Europe. We found that only 37% of the total unique pairwise species interactions occurred in both pollen-transport and flower visitation networks, whereas 28% and 35% were exclusive to pollen-transport and flower visitation networks, respectively. At local level, network specialization was higher in pollen-transport networks, and was negatively related to the diversity of land cover types in both network types. At metanetwork level, pollen transport data revealed that the proportion of single-fragment interactions increased with landscape diversity. Our results show that the specialization of calcareous grasslands' plant-pollinator networks decreases with landscape diversity, but network specialization is underestimated when only based on flower visitation information. Pollen transport data, more than flower visitation, and multi-scale analyses of metanetworks are fundamental for understanding plant-pollinator interactions in human-dominated landscapes.

Strengthening participation of Global South researchers in tropical ecology and conservation is a target of our scientific community, but strategies for fostering increased engagement are mostly directed at Global North institutions and researchers. Whereas such approaches are crucial, there are unique challenges to addressing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within the Global South given its socio-economic, cultural and scientific contexts. Sustainable solutions protecting biodiversity in the tropics depend on the leadership of Global South communities, and therefore DEI improvements in the Global South are paramount in our field. Here, we propose ten key actions towards equitable international collaborations in tropical ecology, which, led by Global South researchers, may improve DEI at institutional, national and international levels. At an institutional level, we recommend (1) becoming role models for DEI, (2) co-developing research with local stakeholders, and (3) promoting transparent funding management favouring local scientists. At a national level, we encourage (4) engagement in political actions protecting scientists and their research in tropical countries, (5) participation in improving biodiversity research policies, and (6) devising research that reaches society. At an international level, we encourage Global South researchers in international collaborations to (7) lead and direct funding applications, (8) ensure equitable workloads, and (9) procure equal benefits among national and foreign collaborators. Finally, (10) we propose that Global South leadership in DEI efforts has the most potential for worldwide improvements, supporting positive long-lasting changes in our entire scientific community. Supplementary materials provide this abstract in 18 other languages spoken in the Global South.

Achieving food security remains a pressing challenge for small-scale farmers, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Ongoing climate change, invasive noxious weeds, and crop pests further exacerbate the situation. Optimizing traditional cropping systems for sustainable yields and climate-resilient production is imperative in order to address this challenge. The pre-Columbian milpa system of intercropping maize with companion crops such as beans ( Phaseolus vulgaris ) and squash ( Cucurbita spp.) is one effective system that has been shown to produce outstanding yields per unit area compared to monoculture systems. The Push-Pull Technology developed in East Africa, based on the use of repellent and trap companion plants intercropped with maize (and to a lesser extent sorghum), is seen to be similarly effective in minimizing the impact of major pests on yields, including striga weed ( Striga spp.), maize stemborers, and the fall armyworm ( Spodoptera frugiperda ). Although both systems have the potential to compensate for each other’s limitations, there has been no cross-system learning between the Mesoamerican milpa and the East African Push-Pull Technology. Here, we review both systems and present the advantages likely to be obtained by combining these technologies in small-scale farming. The proposed milpa push-pull system could adapt to different gradients of altitude, rainfall, and soil nutrient levels, in addition to controlling pests, and therefore has the potential to become a fundamental cropping technique in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

To understand how plant-pollinator interactions respond to habitat fragmentation, we need novel approaches that can capture properties that emerge at broad scales, where multiple communities engage in metanetworks. Here we studied plant-pollinator interactions over 2 years on 29 calcareous grassland fragments selected along independent gradients of habitat size and surrounding landscape diversity of cover types. We associated network centrality of plant-pollinator interactions and grassland fragments with their ecological and landscape traits, respectively. Interactions involving habitat specialist plants and large-bodied pollinators were the most central, implying that species with these traits form the metanetwork core. Large fragments embedded in landscapes with high land cover diversity exhibited the highest centrality; however, small fragments harboured many unique interactions not found on larger fragments. Intensively managed landscapes have reached a point in which all remaining fragments matter, meaning that losing any further areas may vanish unique interactions with unknown consequences for ecosystem functioning.

The development of biodiversity-friendly agricultural landscapes is of major importance to meet the sustainable development challenges of our time. The emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), i.e. drones, has opened a new set of research and management opportunities to achieve this goal. On the one hand, this review summarizes UAV applications in agricultural landscapes, focusing on biodiversity conservation and agricultural land monitoring, based on a systematic review of the literature that resulted in 550 studies. Additionally, the review proposes how to integrate UAV research in these fields and point to new potential applications that may contribute to biodiversity-friendly agricultural landscapes. UAV-based imagery can be used to identify and monitor plants, floral resources and animals, facilitating the detection of quality habitats with high prediction power. Through vegetation indices derived from their sensors, UAVs can estimate biomass, monitor crop plant health and stress, detect pest or pathogen infestations, monitor soil fertility and target patches of high weed or invasive plant pressure, allowing precise management practices and reduced agrochemical input. Thereby, UAVs are helping to design biodiversity-friendly agricultural landscapes and to mitigate yield-biodiversity trade-offs. In conclusion, UAV applications have become a major means of biodiversity conservation and biodiversity-friendly management in agriculture, while latest developments, such as the miniaturization and decreasing costs of hyperspectral sensors, promise many new applications for the future.

1. The land-sharing versus land-sparing debate recently stagnated, lacking an integrating perspective in agricultural landscapes as well as consideration of ecosystem services. Here, we argue that land-sharing (i.e. wildlife-friendly farming systems) and land-sparing (i.e. separation of high-yielding agriculture and natural habitats) are not mutually exclusive, as both are needed to balance management needs for the multifunctionality of agricultural landscapes. 2. Land-sharing promotes ecosystem services in agricultural settings, thereby allowing for environmentally friendly production. Land set aside in protected areas by land-sparing is crucial for conservation of those species that are incompatible with agriculture. 3. Importantly, as species move throughout the landscape and exploit different habitats, increased connectivity between environmentally friendly managed and protected areas is needed to (a) promote spillover of ecosystem service providers from land-sharing/-sparing measures to agricultural production and rescue ser-vice-providing species from extinction in hostile areas, (b) to facilitate immigration and counteract possible extinctions in spared habitats and (c) to conserve response diversity of species communities for ensuring resilience of ecosystem services in changing environments. 4. In conclusion, the successful management of multifunctional landscapes requires the combination of context-specific land-sharing and land-sparing measures within spatially well-connected landscape mosaics, resulting in land-sharing/-sparing connectivity landscapes.

Brazil's environmental legislation obliges private properties to retain a fixed proportion of their total area with native vegetation, the so-called "Legal Reserves". Those areas represent practically one third of the country's native vegetation and are well known for their role in biodiversity protection and in the provisioning of a wide range of ecosystem services for landowners and society. Despite their relevance, this instrument has been criticized by part of the agribusiness sector and its representatives in the Brazilian Congress. The Legal Reserve requirement is said to be too restrictive and to impede the full expansion of agricultural activities, and thus to be detrimental for the development of the country. Here, we critically analyze the arguments employed in the justification of a recently proposed bill that aims to completely extinguish Legal Reserves. We demonstrate that the arguments used are mostly unsupported by data, evidence or theory, besides being based on illogical reasoning. Further, we synthesize the principal benefits of Legal Reserves, including health and economic benefits, and emphasize the importance of these reserves for water, energy, food, and climate securities, in addition to their primary function of assisting in the maintenance of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. We also highlight that Legal Reserves are a key-component for effective and less expensive nature-based solutions, and thus should be considered as assets for the development of Brazil rather than liabilities. Based on available sound scientific evidence and agreement on their relevance, we strongly oppose any attempt to extinguish or weaken the maintenance of Brazil's Legal Reserves.

Context Despite the key role of biological control in agricultural landscapes, we still poorly understand how landscape structure modulates pest control at different spatial scales.Objectives Here we take an experimental approach to explore whether bird and bat exclusion affects pest control in sun coffee plantations, and whether this service is consistent at different spatial scales.Methods We experimentally excluded flying vertebrates from coffee plants in 32 sites in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, encompassing a gradient of forest cover at landscape (2 km radius) and local (300 m) spatial scales, and quantified coffee leaf loss, as an indicator of herbivory, and fruit set.Results Leaf loss decreased with higher landscape forest cover, but this relation was significantly different between treatment and control plants depending on local forest cover. On the other hand, fruit set responded to the interaction between treatment and local forest cover but was not affected by landscape forest cover. More specifically, fruit set increased significantly with local forest cover in exclusion treatments and showed a non-significant decrease in open controls.Conclusions These results suggest that services provided by flying vertebrates are modulated by processes occurring at different spatial scales. We posit that in areas with high local forest cover flying vertebrates may establish negative interactions with predaceous arthropods (i.e. intraguild predation), but this would not be the case in areas with low local forest cover. We highlight the importance of employing a multi-scale analysis in systems where multiple species, which perceive the landscape differently, are providing ecosystem services.

Understanding the dynamics of species interactions under the threats of habitat loss and fragmentation can be key to develop measures preventing further degradation of natural and agricultural systems. Agroecological knowledge and state of the art technologies can help to conciliate the often-discrepant objectives of biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. Specifically, information on the characteristics of plant-pollinator networks in agroecosystems can unveil the most efficient strategies to preserve ecosystem functionality and pollination services provision. In chapter 1, I focused on the contributions of new technology to the objective of turning agricultural landscapes increasingly compatible with biodiversity. I reviewed the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in ecology and precision agriculture. I 1) identified existing applications, 2) discussed limitations and advantages of the current technology, 3) highlighted knowledge gaps and 4) proposed new applications. In chapter 2, I studied the characteristics of a plant-pollinator metanetwork of calcareous grasslands embedded in an agricultural matrix. I characterized and discussed the structural properties of the network that determine its stability and resilience to perturbations. Furthermore, I identified the traits of the most central nodes in the network. I found that the metanetwork was significantly more modular and less connected than expected by chance. This reflects the existence of many fragment-unique interactions and is an indication of poor metanetwork stability. I also demonstrated that habitat size and the diversity of land cover types in the surroundings of a grassland fragment are significant predictors of site centrality. Thus, these features can help to identify the most important fragments for metanetwork cohesiveness. Additionally, I found that the centrality of interactions depends on the pollinator size, species identity and also on the plant's habitat specialization. In chapter 3, I compared plant-pollinator networks constructed with flower visitation data to networks constructed with pollen transport data. The level of specialization of pollen transport networks was higher than that of visitation networks, as half of the interactions in the visitation networks did not occur in the pollen transport networks. This highlights the fact that visitation does not necessarily imply pollen transport, and I discussed its implications for the conservation of pollination. Considering that high specialization is known to be associated with low stability in mutualistic networks, this result has important implications for conservation. According to these findings, traditional studies on plant-pollinator networks, based on visitation data, would overestimate the stability of pollination networks. Additionally, I identified that almost a third of the total number of interactions found are difficult to spot given their low frequency, occurring only in the pollen transport networks. Finally, I found positive effects of landscape diversity on the total number and proportion of single-fragment interactions for pollen transport, but not for visitation networks. In conclusion, the protection of large and small calcareous grasslands as well as the enhancement of landscape heterogeneity was found to be essential for the maintenance of the plant-pollinator metanetwork. Furthermore, the importance of interactions among habitat specialist plants and large-bodied generalist pollinators appeared to be fundamental to connect the plant-pollinator metanetwork. Nonetheless, small solitary bees and the habitat specialist butterfly Polyommatus coridon also played a central role for the plant-pollinator networks in calcareous grasslands. By identifying the most central plants, pollinators and interactions at the metacommunity level, the information reported in this work can inform tailored management measures to protect them. Among others, I suggest considering plant species' roles in the metanetwork when applying conservation measures, such as flower strips, and landscape coordination among farmers to increase crop diversification. Moreover, I showed the great potential of UAVs to contribute to such conservation measures and to biodiversity management in agricultural landscapes. UAVs can assist in diverse tasks such as quantifying encroachment of calcareous grasslands and plant diversity monitoring. Additionally, they can contribute to farmer´s cropland management and agri-environmental schemes surveillance by governmental agencies.